To put the numbers you are about to read into context, I encourage you to visit the Debt Clock at www.usdebtclock.org. Our present national debt is $12.6 trillion and going up by millions of dollars per hour! The long-term, unfunded liability of our government is $56.4 trillion. Your own household’s share of this debt is $483,000.
Each day, 10,000 baby boomers retire, placing additional strain on this already stressed system. Last year alone, the government ran a $1.5 trillion annual budget deficit. In fact, it is projected to run a $1.5 trillion deficit EACH YEAR for the next 10 years. Last year, only about half of our Federal budget was funded with tax revenues, with the other half being funded by taking on even more debt! To make matters worse, 85 percent of the deficit was funded by new bonds issued by our own Treasury, and this debt was bought by the Federal Reserve. When considering these enormously negative numbers, the discussion of adding yet another healthcare entitlement, the largest one ever, becomes a script for the theater of the absurd.
We must scrutinize everything Congress does, first by asking the question, “Can we afford it?” While I agree that we must do something to control healthcare costs, we clearly cannot afford the healthcare bill that recently passed. This bill, in fact, does not even address skyrocketing healthcare costs. Instead, it creates another entitlement program under the illusion of cost control, and places an additional future debt burden upon the nation through its many “unintended consequences.” We are seeing the first of those unintended consequences as companies like AT&T and Caterpillar announce large “writedowns” that they must perform in order to stay in business in this strange, new world. Consequently, the ticking pace of that Debt Clock will only speed upward toward our potential demise.
The premier obligation of this Congress should have been to get federal spending under control and thus slow the pace of this runaway debt disaster. Such action would have provided some hope of fulfilling the promises already made to those 10,000 baby boomers who are retiring each day.
Instead, the accounting principles (or lack thereof) used to calculate the cost curve of this healthcare bill and its impact on the National Debt would make the accounting department at Enron look like Boy Scouts. First, this bill has 10 years of tax increases to pay for six years of coverage. Then it robs a half-trillion dollars from Medicare to create a new entitlement program. Medicare should be preserved and made solvent, not pillaged and strained even further. Next, the bill double-counts $72 billion from long-term care, counting that money as offsets. In the private sector, that kind of accounting would… well, look at Enron!
Finally, this health care debacle places Medicaid mandates upon the states. Currently, most states have unfunded pension problems of their own. States like Maine simply cannot bear these mandates. Had you or I participated in this sort of accounting scheme, and asked investors to support it, we likely would be under investigation by the Security and Exchange Commission.
Economics tells us that costs go down when choices go up. This is true in any consumer market. Competition and choices are an integral part of free markets. Whether you are purchasing bread, soda, houses, or cars, choices create downward pressure on prices. This is true with health insurance as well. Maine is a textbook example of how too much regulation in healthcare results in fewer choices. Providers fled the state, fewer choices were available for consumers, and prices skyrocketed. This is why New Hampshire has more options and lower prices for the same health insurance products. Allowing consumers to buy across state lines would have increased our choices and reduced prices.
At a time when we desperately need more options in healthcare, this bill ultimately will give us fewer choices, and even may one day mandate that we purchase the undesirable public option product as well. In order to enforce this government mandate, the bill provides billions of dollars to the IRS to hire 17,000 additional agents tasked with enforcing this great bit of “history.”
Americans and Mainers are hungry for two things: Truth and Leadership. This bill – and indeed this Congress – falls well short of both.
Republican Dean Scontras will face off in November against Democrat incumbent Chellie Pingree for Maine’s 1st District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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