Health Care version 2.0

As promised, the White House has today posted their revised health care proposal. It can be found here, though readers will find it is long on promises but short on details - more of a campaign pitch then a legislative proposal. The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) says there isn't enough detail in the new plan to make a cost estimate for it.

Still, it does include some improvements. The outrageous special deal for unions on so-called "Cadillac" health care plans has been extended to everyone. The Nebraska Medicare "bribe" has been extended to all states (the good is that it is no longer a special deal just for Nebraska; the bad is that it adds enormous additional expense).

It still doesn't deal with the tort reform needed to control the sky high price of malpractice insurance that drives so much expensive defensive medicine. It still doesn't change the fee-for-service incentives that drive unnecessary procedures. It doesn't address at all the fact that Medicare, as currently constituted, will bankrupt the government in a decade or so - in fact it expands Medicare, and increases the Medicare costs.

There still seems to be little in it that will really bend down the health care cost curve. It adds yet more regulatory bureaucracy, expanding the government even more. And the claim that all this will happen and 31 million more people will get insured, many with government subsidies, and yet it simply won't cost us anything in the long run is pretty hard to believe.

Much will depend on how willing President Obama really is to move back to the center on this bill, and settle for a smaller bill that includes the more widely-supported parts. It also depends on how willing the Democratic Congress is to accept a smaller, less liberal bill. And it may also depend on whether Republicans decide their best strategy is to continue to oppose it. It is, after all, still an amalgam of the House and Senate bills that the Democrats put together after excluding Republicans entirely from the drafting sessions - as near as I can tell it does not contain a single one of the ideas that the Republicans have offered during the recent floor debates. So Republicans might well see this as simply a warmed-over version of the same bills they have opposed all along, with the same central fatal flaw....it adds about a trillion dollars of additional expense to a federal deficit that is already wildly out of control.