Below is OCTax's recent analysis and position statement to Orange County's Congressional Delegration:
2010 Helath Care Bill
Please vote “No” on the proposed Health Care bill.
Is anyone (including OCTax and probably most Members of Congress) fully versed in the content of the Health Care bill? It’s 2,074 pages long, and is amended daily. It would be futile to try to parse it line-by-line, so rather than focusing on content, OCTax considers the probable cost of the bill and the process by which it is being drafted.
The Cost
Citizens, taxpayers, and businesses base their budgets on past performance of the cost of stocks, bonds, entertainment, housing, food, clothing, automobiles and services. Our private budgets are useful and generally accurate (plus or minus 10%) because the costs of those commodities and services are self-limiting. If they become too expensive, we plan to buy less of them.
When we estimate the future cost of the Health Care bill, we can only compare it to the performance of existing federal programs and mandates that are not self-limiting. Medicare and Social Security began as modest pay-as-you-go programs. Now Medicare is $36.3 Trillion in debt; Social Security’s deficit is $6.6 Trillion. The Federal Government itself is $12 Trillion in debt; its 2009 budget deficit will be another $1.7 Trillion. The average household’s share of all this debt is $483,000. Fifty percent of the budget is spent on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt. Current liabilities and unfunded promises total $56.4 Trillion (that’s $56,000.000.000.000.00), an amount that will never be paid off; it will burden future generations of taxpayers with ever-growing interest payments forever. With that kind of management “expertise,” do we really want Congress to oversee health care?
Yet the President and Congress say, “Trust us. The Health Care bill is not a program, it is only 2,074 pages of new mandates, surtaxes and regulations. It will save money.” What elixir has Congress discovered that makes its members better managers of health care than they have been of other mandates? Judging by past performance, the Health Care bill will be a fiscal disaster.
The Process
Consider these quotes, and guess the source.
“. . . how this modest [Health Care] progress is being achieved is alarming. The Obama administration has not put forward one coherent plan as a detailed policy proposal. Every major piece of public policy has been turned over to the backrooms of Congress, emerging through the lobby-infested bargaining process among vested and regional interests.
“This approach, it is often said, reflects the ‘learning’ from the failures of the Clinton administration’s attempt to reform health care . . . This time, the logic goes, the administration will leave no easy target in the form of detailed policy proposals that can be shot down. It will let the negotiations among interest groups take place first and deftly guide a compromise piece of legislation to adoption.
“By refusing to put forward clear plans, the administration is creating gaping and unnecessary weaknesses in public policy. First, and most important, the bad parts of legislation are not shot down . . . Second, backroom negotiations are of course an invitation to vast, shady transfers of wealth.”
No, OCTax did not write these things, but we wish we had. The author (a supporter of the Health Care bill) is the liberal, pro-government Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, writing for Scientific American magazine. He nailed exactly the genesis of the Health Care bill.
Please vote “No.”
