Dealing With the Facts
Let’s assume that there are still some readers out there who harbor the delusion that government-run healthcare is a good idea. Could we even afford to pay for it? The answer, of course, is no fucking way.
If you forgot to get a Christmas present for Charlie Rangel, don’t worry. The congressman picked one out for himself, and he’s sending you the bill: $2 million for a shiny new Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College.
The New York Democrat’s Monument to Me was one of about 9,000 earmarks in the omnibus spending bill Congress approved before going on vacation. Most represented a more subtle form of self-aggrandizement, aimed at maintaining power and prestige by currying favor with voters.
According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the total cost of the 11,000 or so earmarks in the omnibus bill and an earlier defense bill is about $14 billion, which is not much in the context of a $2.8 trillion federal budget. But the same tendency that explains the persistence of earmarks—the habit of staying popular by pretending your constituents can get something for nothing—also explains the failure to address the federal government’s increasingly dire fiscal situation.
The root of that situation is not earmarks, which represent less than 1 percent of federal spending. Nor is it the war in Iraq, which at $100 billion or so a year accounts for less than 4 percent.
So-called entitlement programs are the reason “America faces escalating deficit levels and debt burdens that could swamp our ship of state,” as Comptroller General David Walker put it in a recent speech. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid account for 40 percent of federal spending and are expected to consume 51 percent in a decade.
Right now Social Security makes the federal fiscal picture look better than it really is, since the program generates a surplus that masks the true size of the deficit. In fiscal year 2007, for example, the official budget deficit was $163 billion; excluding the Social Security surplus, it was more than twice as high.
Since the government spends the surplus on other programs, the Social Security “trust fund” consists entirely of federal bonds, and those IOUs will come due soon. The oldest baby boomers become eligible for early retirement in 2008. They will start drawing Medicare benefits in three years.
The result, said Walker, will be a “tsunami of spending” that “will never recede.” Under current law the estimated gap between the benefits retirees have been promised and revenue to fund them is $53 trillion, of which $34 trillion is due to Medicare.
For those of you who aren’t aware, Medicare is America’s free government healthcare program for the poor. So when Michael Moore tells you that there is no healthcare here for poor people, I’ve got $34,000,000,000,000 in IOUs that say otherwise. Make sure you take note of the fact that the Iraq War costs less than 4% of federal spending. This is one of the most common arguments we hear from Moore-ons who write us, that if it wasn’t for the evil Bush and his war for oil then we’d have all the money in the world for fabulous free government healthcare.
So, let’s hear some real-world solutions from the Michael Moore crowd. Other than claiming that “free” government healthcare is more “compassionate,” make a practical argument about (a) how and (b) why the US government can provide fabulous free healthcare for everyone.
Comments
fangbeer, good question and there are some very bad medicare forecasts (Ie, they’re wrong*) but this guy is only predicting a 41 to 50% change. I’m not sure that prediction is using the bad models. Using those you get much higher numbers.
* they take the recent (say last 10 years) increases in healthcare costs and assume they’ll continue almost indefinitely at those rates. Which is pure speculation as there is no evidence the recent rises in healthcare costs will become a norm. The bad predictions are on their way to becoming a conservative myth of sorts since they back their anti entitlement arguments. But they’re still probably way off… and entitlement programs still are a serious budget issue even without them…
When I am Czar of the United States of America I will impose a line item veto upon all bills sent to my desk.
The question I always pose to these mooreons who say that if we didnt have the war we would have all this money for health care is this: If that is true, then why was health care in so much trouble BEFORE the war ever started? Like during the Clinton era? We weren’t at war then and we didnt have free government-provided health care!
Still had to pay for missiles to launch at aspirin factories in case someone discovers a stained dress.
Actually, Medicare isn’t for poor, it’s for the old. Medicaid is for the poor (it’s in debt, too).
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Who prepares the estimate, and how is it prepared?
I ask because I wonder how they project health care costs for a group of people over a span of 20-30 years. How do you guess which sorts of procedures will go up in price, which will decline, and how much new expense will be added by new developments?