The Health Care Debate

No one should have expected an overhaul of the American health care system to be easy, and it isn’t. During this August Congressional recess, all sides in this debate are playing hardball, and it’s pretty hard to see what is really happening for all the misinformation being circulated. Conservatives are claiming (falsely) that this is a move to a nationalized health care system. Liberal are claiming (falsely) that it won’t cost much and that in any case insurance companies are making out like bandits (they actually rank about 35th in profitability – a pretty poor showing).

And of course it doesn’t help that in fact there isn’t any actual proposed legislation to debate yet – just a bunch of wildly different draft bills from various House and Senate committees.

But a few things are clear:

a) The administration is certainly right that America needs to overhaul its health care system. We currently spend about 17% of the nation’s gross domestic product on health care, almost 4 ½ times as much as we spend on national defense, and the costs are rising at about twice the rate of inflation. We spend more per capita on health care than any other nation on earth, yet the World Health Organization ranks America's health care as 37th in the world, down with Costa Rica and Slovenia, with worse life expectancy and higher infant mortality than many nations that spend substantially less per capita.

b) It certainly seems that a nation that can afford to offer multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses on Wall Street to people who actually produce nothing of concrete value in the world ought to be able to offer at least the most basic health care insurance and coverage to all of its citizens.

c) Most of the plans currently being considered by the various Congressional committees are going to cost a lot, despite the continued promises of “revenue neutral” solutions. Unfortunately, liberal legislators can’t seem to see any solutions that don’t involve the government spending more, and as the Congressional Budget Office keeps pointing out, this doesn’t do anything to lower the actual costs. Unfortunately, conservative legislators can’t seem to find anything practical to offer as an alternative, so they are reduced to just “being against” anything proposed.

d) And all of this against a backdrop of an absolutely astounding increase in the national debt. The Bush administration added almost $5 trillion to the national debt over its eight years in office, which was appalling enough. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Obama administration’s current budget plans appear to be on track to add about $10 trillion more to the national debt over two terms, and that is without adding any new expensive programs like a national health care plan.

It should be an interesting August.