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August 10, 2011
Moving the Goal Posts on Healthcare
See, I don't recall this being the sales point with which President Obama and his allies pushed ObamaCare:
New projections show that health care spending will grow faster than the nation's GDP over the next decade. But the increase will be only slightly more than would be the case without the new national health law.At least that's what the White House and other health law supporters drew from a new analysis of actuarial data released by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The analysis, published in Health Affairs last week, reported that health spending through 2020 would rise only one-tenth of one percent more under the health law than it would have otherwise — despite some 30 million more people getting health coverage.
Sure, a bunch of young, healthy people will now have insurance that they wouldn't otherwise have purchased without incurring Earth-shaking costs, but ObamaCare wasn't sold on the great deal that it would provide in covering additional recipients. It was going to slow the inflation of health care costs. Indeed, it was going to be a sort of deficit reduction program for the government. That's clearly not expected, now, and wasn't expected by many of us who opposed the legislation in the first place:
Over the next 10 years, federal actuaries expect the pace to pick up. By 2020, the national bill will be $4.6 trillion — one in every five dollars spent in the U.S. economy. The government's share also will rise. Washington will pay 30 percent of the tab, and state and local governments will pay almost 20 percent. Average annual spending growth over the decade will be 5.8 percent, according to the analysis.
Our broke and flailing government is currently covering about 27% of $2.7 trillion in healthcare spending, or $729 billion. In 2020, that federal expenditure will be $1.38 trillion, with state and local governments paying another $92 billion. (The article doesn't say what the lower-tier governments currently pay.)
Repeal this monstrosity.
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Other countries manage to cover 100% of their people for well under 10% of GDP, while our sick combination of private care paid for by both private and public insurance already costs us 18%, and rising, while only covering 85% of the population. We obviously have the whole thing VERY wrong.
In other terms, switching to Japan's universal care would effectively 'save' the US economy 11% of GDP, freeing up as much capital for job creation as cutting ALL taxes in half. The downside for conservatives is that taxes would go up forty percent or so, but the overall impact on consumer and corporate wallets would go down quite a bit.
How did we get it SO WRONG here? Don't you think that health insurance costs are more of a barrier to hiring than taxes and regulations? I certainly do, and so do a lot of small business owners.
Honestly, I'd rather see it go entirely one way or another: Either deregulate and open up health insurance between states, or switch to universal care that covers 90% of costs (the remaining 10% would be the market incentive to the consumer). any plan that takes health care responsibilities away from employers is going to be good for the economy. Out it where it belongs, on the consumers, by way of a truly free market or via the government (with taxes paying for it coming from personal income, balanced annually using a tax that's outside the overall budget).
Posted by: mangeek at August 10, 2011 8:19 AM