Last weekend, on a barstool, I was making the only argument you need against Obamacare (first made by me here): The government should not be taking on massive new obligations when it is unable to pay its massive OLD obligations. The person with whom I was speaking replied, "But Obamacare has more than a trillion dollars worth of savings and increased revenues; those add up to much more than the cost of the program."
My response: At this point, those savings and increased revenues are largely theoretical. They depend to a significant degree on politicians wilfully imposing pain on well-heeled, politically active constituencies, and on well-heeled, politically active constituencies passively accepting the pain that has been imposed upon them.
That doesn't give me a lot of confidence.
So, here's what I propose: Before we do the spending side of the program, let's see if the savings and tax revenues actually materialize.* If they do, fantastic. We'll still be broke as a country, but we'll be marginally less broke, and we can talk about whether we want to celebrate our slightly less impecunious state by extending government-guaranteed health care to all.
If, on the other hand, those savings and tax revenues DON'T materialize, then we'll all say, in unison, "Wow, thank goodness we didn't go through with the full health care reform, because then we'd be double-secret SUPER broke!"
Footnote: And I didn't even talk about whether the program's cost projections were realistic...
*If you want a simple example of how things can go wrong quickly, consider that the administration has already acknowledged that $80 billion in purported Obamacare savings over 10 years will never materialize. That $80 billion was supposed to arise from premiums under the CLASS (long-term care) program, which would be collected for five years before any benefits were paid. That program, however, has been cancelled; the administration acknowledged that it was financially unworkable over the long haul.
So, there go $80 billion in savings out the window, long before serious program implementation even begins.
Comments