Obama's Healthcare Logic Deficit: You Don't Spend Money to Save Money
By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
David Leonhardt writes a great explanation in today's New York Times of where the deficit came from, and how big it is. It's in plain English and it makes it clear that the reckless spending of the Bush years made things bad, the current recession made things worse, and Obama's massive stimulus spending continues the mess. I highly recommend it to you. There's also a terrific graphic that conveys the information visually.
Why do we need to spend even more money to lower healthcare costs? With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit, it's time to stop the spending and cut costs. I don't get it. In our family budget, we don't spend more money in order to save it. We just stop spending so much money. It doesn't cost us more money to do that. The federal government isn't any different—except for the crazy attitude among politicians and interest groups that a "cut" is really a slowdown in the rate of growth. We don't need slowdowns in the rate of growth. We need real cuts before we're driven into bankruptcy.
Correction: In yesterday's blog, I mistakenly wrote that President Obama had moved from the second person to the first person in his use of "I" instead of "we," when I meant to say he had moved to the first person singular from the plural. My high school English teacher would be horrified, and I apologize to all the linguists out there.
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Tags: healthcare | Barack Obama | Obama administration
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Reader Comments
remotepc support
Obama's plan is to "restructure" our current system and spend money to ....
Conservatives ruin the economy every time
Do you expect us to take this hypocrisy seriously? You had eight years to fix the budget, but instead you created a global economic meltdown. For your information, health care and education are two things that improve society, so it doesn't surprise me that conservatives oppose them. They would rather waste our tax dollars on wars, prisons, and Wall St crooks. It will probably take decades to clean up the conservative economic mess.
A family budget is a bad example
The example to use is a new business. Everyone knows that if you start a business first you have to spend money. This is why business almost always loos money the first year. Right now the government is trying to start the economy back up. Of course that costs money. If it works it will bring in more revenue because everyone will be making more.
Health insurance is just another component of that we need a new competing endity that can be more efficent then the insurance companies. That shouldn't be hard to do but it will take start up costs. Staying with the insurance companies is like sitting down at a 99% payback machine in Las Vegas. It doesn't take long for all your money to be gone. Course the insurance companies are more like an 80% payback so Vegas is probably a better bet for national solvancy then the current health insurance system.
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