Let me say for the record: we can't get something for nothing. If we insure more Americans, either they must pay for it, or government must. The problem with BaucusCare is that, without a strong public plan or single-payer, there are no real ways to lower the cost of health spending. The plan is not liberal enough.
Yes, mandating more healthy people to participate in the private health insurance system will in effect be taking money from healthy people who don't want insurance to subsidize the health premiums of older, sicker people. But insurers always use lower-risk groups to cover their costs of higher-risk groups. This is the essence of insurance. If anything, mandates are a giveaway to the private health insurance industry. But as a nation, if we're not going to cover everyone who wants insurance but can't afford it through a public plan, then we have to find another way. It is irresponsible of us to have so many uninsured people.
But what about those families of four who don't want health insurance, won't a mandate be a real tax on them like Morris says? Show them to me. Show me the family that doesn't want affordable health insurance, at least for its children.
I thought conservatives were always complaining about the deficit and runaway Medicare spending. So if Obama is proposing to cut Medicare, shouldn't conservatives be happy? Methinks Dick the Pollster is trying to scare old folks into the Republican fold in 2010.
Look,
in 2009, the health spending for a typical family of four is $16,700, according to the private
Millman's Index. And yet Morris is worried because the CBO estimates that, under BaucusCare,
in 2016 the average family of four will pay $15,000 with premiums, deductibles, and co-payments. Maybe I'm missing something or comparing apples to oranges here, but the Baucus plan looks like a
savings (especially considering the 8 percent real annual growth rate in U.S. health spending).
What would be the cost if we did nothing, and kept the "best health care system in the world?" Health care economist Uwe Reinhardt has
written about it repeatedly:
"At an annual growth rate of 3 percent, a wage base of $60,000 now will grow to $80,600 in 10 years. On the other hand, at an annual growth rate of 8 percent, [the real annual growth rate in health spending from 2005 to 2009 - J] a family's total spending on health care would grow from $16,700 now to $36,000 in 10 years.
"It follows that 10 years hence health care would swallow up 44 percent of this family's gross wage base in 2019, before any allowance for employer- or employee-paid fringe benefits and taxes. It is the perfect storm into which America's lower middle class now is being pushed, if the leaders of America's health system continue to manage that system in their customary style, totally in abstraction from the fiscal agony that their expensive managerial and practice style visits on the rest of the country."
By Dick Morris
September 2009 | Creators.com
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