Newest term to describe ObamaCare naysayers: “Political terrorists”

A terribly irresponsible column from someone who usually does better.

By now, you’ve probably also heard that health reform will cost taxpayers at least a trillion dollars. Another lie.

First of all, that’s not a trillion every year, as most people assume — it’s a trillion over 10 years, which is the silly way that people in Washington talk about federal budgets. On an annual basis, that translates to about $140 billion, when things are up and running.

Even that, however, grossly overstates the net cost to the government of providing universal coverage. Other parts of the reform plan would result in offsetting savings for Medicare: reductions in unnecessary subsidies to private insurers, in annual increases in payments rates for doctors and in payments to hospitals for providing free care to the uninsured. The net increase in government spending for health care would likely be about $100 billion a year, a one-time increase equal to less than 1 percent of a national income that grows at an average rate of 2.5 percent every year.

This is outrageous. First of all, there’s no basis for the charge that “most people” believe it costs a trillion a year. A trillion over ten years is still an enormous amount of money to add to the deficit during that span. It dwarfs the size of President Bush’s Social Security personal account proposal, which opponnts have no qualms about discussing in terms of aggregate dollars spread over longer time periods.

Secondly, it understates the cost, rather than overstates it. The net effect on federal health care commitments is $820 billion over ten years, even if all projected savings materializes. This amount would be growing by $150 billion per year beyond the projection period.

This is a multi-trillion-dollar expansion of federal health care commitments, and anyone who doesn’t understand that shouldn’t be writing so self-assuredly about it.

Chuckles3 on August 7, 2009 at 11:36 AM

Pearlstein also fails to take note that passing on the costs of the health care expansion doesn’t eliminate them. The Nye-Schieber study reported today on HotAir is instructive in this regard. Even if the final bill is ‘deficit neutral’ it would pass the costs along to workers in the form of lower wages.

Chuckles3 on August 7, 2009 at 2:30 PM