Cost of Healthcare Reform

The Democrats are celebrating their hard-won victory. Some members of house, in addition to the President, have called this victory good for the nations bottom-line, citing a Congressional Budget Office report that says we will reap tens and hundreds of billions in savings. Yet in a NYT op-ed, DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN, the CBO director from 2003-2005, notes that:

the budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed. So fantasy in, fantasy out.

In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.

This changes my support for the bill, and I suspect that it would change others as well. I do not consider healthcare--or any other entitlement program--to be an inalienable right. (Some may argue that healthcare is part of the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" referred to as inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence. I do not agree. The rights in the Declaration are rights from molestation. We are free to preserve our lives, liberties and happiness without interference from government; we are not guaranteed that any of these shall be effectively realized.)

I am not ethically opposed to social programs (though I had the idea that we deserve anything other than protection of our rights from the government), but I do think we can only have as much as we can afford. Unless the healthcare legislation is edited to ensure that real, substantive cost controls are implemented both for consumers and for the government, I will vote against any representative who supports this bill--all other things being equal.