The Death of Obama's Healthcare Reform
By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The healthcare overhaul debate has entered its second phase. In the first phase, the healthcare overhaul was seen as an unstoppable policy juggernaut rolling down the tracks. Obama gathered all the healthcare stakeholders in the White House and they sang about how they wanted to buy the world a Coke (some Democrats threw in a chorus about slapping a surtax on the Coke, but all was good).
Now we are in phase two: The pre-mortem dissections, from the left and from the right, of why the Obama health plan is about to disappear into policy oblivion. The consensus seems to be that excessive cost is dragging the details-still-to-come health overhaul down.
On the left, the Post's Ezra Klein points out the fallacy of getting fixated on one arbitrary number (in this case $1 trillion), which he calls "very dangerous." TNR's Jonathan Cohn warns fellow liberals that they are "in danger of losing the fight for universal health insurance." In both cases, scoring from the Congressional Budget Office is central to the problem, and, Atlantic's Marc Ambinder points out, that issue can be laid at the feet of (irony of ironies) Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director.
From the right, Jim Pinkerton writes for us today ascribing blame for the demise of healthcare reform to Obama's big bank bailouts. They ate up all the money, Pinkerton argues, leaving nothing for the overhaul.
Indeed, for the first time, congressional Republicans are thinking that maybe they can beat back Obamacare, after all. Concerns about the deficit and debt are rising, and startled Democrats are being forced to pay close attention to surging popular anxiety. So what happened? How did Obama take his mandate for healthcare action and fritter it away—in less than five months?
The answer, of course, is that Obama made other things a priority. He said that bailing out the banks was a higher priority, and so that's what he did—he has presided over the greatest upward wealth transfer in American history. The fiscal future of the country was thus given over to Wall Street. The perceived "march to socialism" that has antagonized so many over the past few months was not a trek on behalf of Main Street's healthcare needs, it was a trek on behalf of Wall Street's red-ink needs. And so healthcare has been left as a straggler; if any bill passes this year, it will be substantially truncated, falling far short of the goal of full coverage for the 46 million uninsured.
At some point over the summer, we'll enter phase three, which involves less analysis and more legislating (or not).
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Tags: healthcare | Barack Obama | religion
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Reader Comments
obamacare
As a physician i can only smile(better than crying) when 72% of the people supposedly want government healthcare. Go take a look at the medicaid program, the county hospitals where the sick are housed, or the V.A. where our ex-military are cared for...if you like what you see you will love obamacare. Oh and did I mention that those programs are fiscally totally broken with more proposed budget cuts and higher taxes to keep them cobbled together for another couple of years. How about when the government provides housing for the poor...csn you say "housing projects, ghettos, slums". i am going to retire, sit back, and laugh as this country spends itself into oblivion. Anyone who believes anything any politician tells you, dem or repub, is either gullible or just plain stupid. If anyone is interested in overthrowing this crooked government give me a call...now that is something I could get really excited about. I would love to die in battle for my grandchildren in hopes of taking the country back...surely you must remember that old corny document called the U.S. Constitution.
Let’s put this in context:
Soon Medicare will face a moment of truth. The previous positive cash flow has already gone negative. The baby-boomers are about to retire to draw money out of the system instead of paying into it. They will also begin drawing money out of their retirement plans instead of paying into them, reducing the capitalization of our economy. Please read this congressional testimony from a year ago:
“Significant uncertainty surrounds long-term fiscal projections, but under any plausible scenario, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path—that is, federal debt will grow much faster than the economy over the long run. In the absence of significant changes in policy, rising costs for health care and the aging of the U.S. population will cause federal spending to grow rapidly. If federal revenues as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) remain at their current level, that rise in spending will eventually cause future budget deficits to become unsustainable. To prevent deficits from growing to levels that could impose substantial costs on the economy, revenues must rise as a share of GDP, or projected spending must fall—or some combination of the two outcomes must be achieved.
. . .
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that total federal Medicare and Medicaid outlays will rise from 4 percent of GDP in 2007 to 12 percent in 2050 and
19 percent in 2082—which, as a share of the economy, is roughly equivalent to the total amount that the federal government spends today. The bulk of that projected increase in health care spending reflects higher costs per beneficiary rather than an increase in the number of beneficiaries associated with an aging population.”
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/93xx/doc9385/06-17-LTBO_Testimony.pdf
This inescapable reality says we will have to pay more for less benefits. But politicians are promising just the opposite, to people who believe that they should get even more benefits, much sooner, without paying anything. Such demands cannot be met.
Seeing how our government is handling a much smaller crisis in the banking industry, failing to correct course before it collapsed the housing industry, and the automobile industry, I worry that no one in our nations capital is prepared to avoid this massive iceberg that will sink our ship. Instead people continue to demand more benefits to be paid by younger generations, as if Chinese lending is a bottomless well. Do you have grandchildren? Look what you are doing to them.
The 'human condition' is what it is, and politicians have no power to improve upon it. They are merely promising to let us continue living beyond our means, at the expense of those younger than us. The question is whether or not you believe that your grandchildren should become slaves to the government for the rest of their lives through ever increasing taxation, to continue providing you with economic benefits from the government, you believe are owed to you.
MrUniteUs
72& percent of Americans support Public option
56& of Americans are willing to pay higher taxes for
Universl Health care.
The longer it takes to pass the more expensive.
The Pharmeceuticals agreed to kick in 80 billion to subsidize
prescription drubs.
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