07.18.09
Can they ram it through anyway?
You may have heard by now about the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment that FHer-style health-care reform can never be affordable.
It’s now part of the public record and disseminated through out the media, new and “mainstream,” but the zeal of the commandantes to make it law doesn’t seem diminished in the slightest. The Blue Dogs say they’ll vote against it, but a.) with a 40-seat FHer majority in the House, they are not crucial to passage anyway, and b.) some will undoubtedly fold under the icy glare of San Fran Nan. Let us not forget that cap-and-trade narrowly passed in this body recently.
In the meantime, you’ll find this busting of health-care myths at Stumbling On Truth edifying.
Mr. Dings said,
July 19, 2009 at 12:38 am
Didn’t every candidate in both major parties have a health care plan? That was supposedly a big issue for the electorate. Can you name a candidate that did not address the issue during the campaign? Oh well, now it’s a myth or totalitarianism or worse. I tellya it will fail because we can’t get it together. We all pay for those who don’t have insurance anyhow.
Bentnotesmanhisself said,
July 19, 2009 at 3:35 am
Well, every candidate may have had a plan, but I’m not sure that tells us anything. Some were good, some were awful. Those with the awful plans have control of Congress and the White House now.
Mr. Dings said,
July 19, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Maybe they should fudge the figures to make it more palatable. It was fairly recently done with the Iraq War budget.
Bentnotesmanhisself said,
July 20, 2009 at 12:43 am
As if war budgets can be some kind of airtight prediction of what’s needed for victory.
Bentnotesmanhisself said,
July 20, 2009 at 12:54 am
Is that what you want? For the FHers to fudge the numbers and get their plan through even though the real numbers, per the CBO, show it’s unsustainable from the get-go?
Mr. Dings said,
July 20, 2009 at 12:56 am
You’ve got an answer for everything, dontcha? In a democracy, when the question is asked, it needs to be answered, as accurately as possible. You carp at butter, yet justify free reign when it comes to bombs. If you are going to argue against health care reform based upon its affordability, of course, let’s try to get the numbers right. But you’re willing to excuse laxity, if not outright deception, when it comes to bombs, if I am hearing you correctly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/washington/19cost.html
Lawrence B. Lindsey, who was ousted as President Bush’s first economic adviser partly because he predicted the war might cost $100 billion to $200 billion, also has a new book that serves in part as an I-told-you-so.
“Five years after the fact, I believe that one of the reasons the administration’s efforts are so unpopular is that they chose not to engage in an open public discussion of what the consequences of the war might be, including its economic cost,” Mr. Lindsey wrote in an excerpt in Fortune magazine.
Mr. Lindsey insists that his projections were partly right. “My hypothetical estimate got the annual cost about right,” he wrote. “But I misjudged an important factor: how long we would be involved.”
He was not alone.
Congressional Democrats, for instance, predicted that the Iraq war would cost roughly $93 billion, not including reconstruction.
Virtually every forecast was off in this way. “It’s clear that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone on longer and have been more expensive than the projections initially suggested,” Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said in an interview.
Only one economist, William D. Nordhaus of Yale, seems to have come close. In a paper in December 2002, he offered a worst-case estimate of $1.9 trillion, “if the war drags on, occupation is lengthy, nation-building is costly.”
Bentnotesmanhisself said,
July 20, 2009 at 11:59 am
And we probably should have listened to Nordhaus and hunkered down and adjusted our budget to accomodate such a scenario – since we had to fight those wars.
Keeping us safe from enemy attack is the first responsibility of the federal government.
How we get our health cared for is no responsibility of the federal government.