You may recognize these proposals; they are recycled from the Obama budget. Estimated cost savings listed: $215 billion over ten years. That leaves just $1.785 trillion for the “stakeholders” to find. And with a model of stakeholder cooperation like Chrysler before us, that shouldn’t be hard.
This is all very well as political theater; politicians convene never-never working groups all the time. But, being perhaps too cynical, I suspect that the announced plan to save $2 trillion is going to be used to sell Obama’s healthcare plan as if we’d already found it. Then when oh, darn, the SEIU doesn’t agree to hold down wages or eliminate jobs, and pharma ratchets up the average price it charges the private sector to make sure it doesn’t lose too much on its mandatory Medicaid discounts, etc, well, we’ll all just have to dig into our pockets to pay for it, won’t we?
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