The Senate Health care proposal

The Senate Finance Committee health care bill is now out. (The text can be found here). This is the bill which will probably be the framework around which the House and Senate try to build a bill they can both pass. The language of the bill has certainly moved to the center relative to the very left-wing bills the three House committees reported out. And it does include a number of concessions to Republican and moderate Democrat concerns.

But it still has two very, very big problems:

1) It contains no provisions that seem likely to really reduce health care costs. The promise that "more efficiencies" will reduce costs is no more likely to be real here than the perennial campaign claim that "reducing government waste" will reduce government costs. There is no persuasive evidence in government that such measures have ever reduced costs.

2) It will add a huge additional debt to a government budget already tottering under a skyrocketing debt. The Congressional Budget Office cost estimate for this bill is about $850 BILLION over the next ten years, and much more after that. History suggests that the real cost of a new government program will be in the range of 2-3 times the initial Congressional estimate, so the real cost is almost certainly somewhere in the TRILLIONS.

President Obama's promise that this bill will not add a dime to the national debt is good political rhetoric, but it is a promise that will be almost impossible to keep. Logically there is simply no way to simultaneously extend coverage to millions more people, provide everyone else with at least their current level of health care at their current cost, and not spend any more government money. It might just be possible to achieve any two of the three, but it's simply not possible to achieve all three simultaneously.