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Dan
Calabrese
Read Dan's bio and previous columns here
September 10, 2009
Obama’s Health Speech:
Everything for Everyone for Nothing
One’s head may be prone to spinning after listening to all the promises
President Obama made during his Wednesday night address on health care.
But I think the room has just about stopped spinning, and the
president’s grand vision is becoming clear.
Let me see if I have this straight:
President Obama is going create a “public option” covering people who
can’t afford any other kind of health care coverage. It will not add one
cent to the deficit. It will all be paid for, presumably, by the
premiums these people pay – the very people who can’t afford free-market
health insurance.
But even though these people are paying extremely low-cost premiums –
since that’s all they can afford – they will have all the care they
need, and President Obama himself will personally see to it that no
bureaucrat gets in between them and their health care!
Wow. That’s some plan. Top-rate coverage at bargain-basement prices,
with absolutely no deficit-bloating federal dollars being used to
subsidize the system.
But wait, there’s more. Obama is going to reduce the cost of health care
by 1 percent – even though he is creating unlimited demand for the
service, which means reducing costs is impossible – and this is going to
reduce the deficit by $4 trillion.
Wait.
Didn’t he just say that health care wasn’t going to add one red cent to
the deficit? He did. So how is it that reducing the cost of health care
(as if he could) would reduce the deficit by $4 trillion? Is health care
contributing to the deficit or isn’t it?
Maybe to find out, we could look at the “public option” that already
exists – Medicare. Obama spoke glowingly of Medicare during his speech,
and emphasized that it is a “public trust” that can never be betrayed.
This, of course, is how he plans to run the public option insurance
company, which will delivery first-rate care at low-rent prices. So does
that mean cost-control in ObamaCare will follow the example of Medicare?
Uh
oh. Medicare has the federal government on the hook for $30 trillion in
future costs – costs for which we have no idea how to get the money –
all because the people who created Medicare decided it would be a sacred
trust that would provide its beneficiaries anything they needed.
Obama also waxed poetic about Social Security, and how its founders
refused to back down when people warned about its costs, because darn
it, giving checks to old people who need them is awesome. But Social
Security, too, represents an unfunded liability that has the nation on
the road to bankruptcy.
Cost savings? Thy name is not Obama. He’s busy mouthing platitudes like
“We did not come here to fear the future; we came here to shape it.” The
only thing he mentioned that might save some costs, by his own previous
statements, is the denial of care to the elderly who, you know, will die
pretty soon anyway.
But Obama only mentioned this by way of giving a shout out to the leader
of the opposition, Sarah Palin, whom he accused (not by name, but
obviously enough) of flat-out lies for telling the truth.
The truth is that Obama’s own science czar has cited the denial of care
to the elderly as a pretty sweet opportunity to shave costs from the
system, and Obama himself has cited end-of-life care as a huge cost, for
which he would bring together “ethicists” among others to find a
solution.
That might be called a death panel, and boy howdy, it sure would save
money, but Obama denies that he wants to have them, even though he does.
Obama’s logic on health care is about the same as it is on most things:
Everyone will have everything they want, no one will have to pay
anymore, nothing will be added to the deficit, and everyone will be able
to make whatever choices they want.
If
only life worked that way. If only anything worked that way.
© 2009 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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