One of President Obama's primary justifications for pushing
health care legislation has been that the status quo is
"unsustainable" because of the skyrocketing cost of medical care
in the United States. The way to rein in costs, he argues, is to
do adopt the policies that he and his fellow Democrats are
proposing. But a new
report by the government actuary at the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services, a branch of the Obama administration's
Department of Health and Human Services, has found that the exact
opposite is true.
CMS took a close look at the health care bill that was passed by
House Democrats and endorsed by the White House, and it found
that not only would the bill not reduce health care costs -- it
would increase them. Time and again, we have been reminded that
the United States spends a higher percentage of its GDP on health
care than any other nation -- about 16 percent. As Obama put it
in his June
speech to the American Medical Association, "If we fail to
act, one out of every five dollars we earn will be spent on
health care within a decade." Yet if we adopt the legislation
supported by Obama -- which finances expanded coverage through
tax increases and Medicare cuts -- health care spending will
actually rise to 21.1 percent of GDP, according to CMS, compared
to 20.8 percent if we simply do nothing.
"Make no mistake: The cost of our health care is a threat to our
economy," Obama told AMA. "It's an escalating burden on our
families and businesses. It's a ticking time bomb for the federal
budget. And it is unsustainable for the United States of
America."
I suppose a liberal could still argue that it's better to cover
more people even if it will cost us more as a nation. But given
that Obama has spent much of the year arguing that the reason we
need to do something about health care is that the status quo is
"unsustainable," then it's pretty hard to justify health care
policies that are more costly than the status quo.
