I’ve written about health care before, but Kita sent me a link to the best write up on it to date from John Cassidy at the New Yorker.
He says what I feel about the situation with a lot more eloquence and analysis:
I regard an expansion of the government safety net as ethically essential, economically justified, and long overdue… But we will be dealing with its consequences for decades to come, and I think it’s important to be clear about what the reform amounts to.
Let’s remind ourselves of the basics. There are two big (and linked) problems with the current health-care system. It excludes 46.3 million Americans, according to the Census Bureau, and it is inordinately expensive. The proposed reform purports to tackle both of these problems; in fact, it only addresses the first one in any systematic manner. The future cost savings that the Administration and its congressional allies are promising to deliver are based on wishful thinking and sleight of hand. Over time, the reform, as proposed, would almost certainly add substantially to the budget deficit, thereby worsening the long-term fiscal crisis that the country faces
That’s the story. As an enthusiastic Obama campaign supporter, I’m quite disappointed by this, his first big reform initiative.
Health Care is a HUGE challenge, and we could have dealt with it by honestly confronting the truth of the situation and actually dealing with the costs. It would have been challenging, it would have required a national revolutionary fervor to make it happen—but frankly that’s what I expected from the Obama era.
Instead we’re just increasing our deficit, which is the last thing we should be doing.
