Before becoming Barack Obama’s budget chief, Peter Orszag gave his future boss an indirect warning Thursday that health care reform will be neither cheap nor easy.
“(The first report) shows that many of the things that Obama and Congressional Democrats think will save costs, such as preventive care and information technology, won’t really save much money,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “It also shows that covering the uninsured will cost a lot of money.”
Better preventive care and health IT would save Medicare $850 million and $22 billion, respectively, over 10 years. Over that time, Medicare is expected to cost $6.7 trillion….
“If you read between the lines, he’s saying that health care reform will be a blood bath, not quick and easy,” said Cannon.
Others aren’t sure that will be enough. Health policy consultant Robert Laszewski, a former insurance industry executive, [says,] “There is no consensus in Congress or the country on what a comprehensive health care bill would look like…. Plus we don’t have the money.”
“They all want to be at the table because they don’t want to be on the menu,” Cannon says of the interest groups. “Sooner or later, someone is going to be on the menu. You can’t do comprehensive reform without goring someone’s ox.”
SOURCE: CATO@LIBERTY
My opinion is that health care reform the way B. Hussein Obama wants to do it will end up with poorer health care and with greater cost to us the tax payers. There was talk that people would be forced to buy insurance. Just another way of the socicalist government to take over your life!
