Obama's healthcare speech

Tonight's oration to a joint session of Congress was remarkable to me in its simplicity. I thought that Obama (or at least his advisers) would undestand that America wanted to have details on the plan for healthcare. And not just details, but true details. All we got was more of the same. When the President announced that he would not sign any bill that did not pay for itself, "PERIOD", I knew that truth was not playing a large role in Obama's statements. After all, here he is advocating increaseing the number of patients by the millions, forcing incurance companies to accept all pre-existing conditions while setting no maximums for insurance coverage, promising to lower the cost of coverage for most Americans and, nost fantastic of all, paying for this by cutting waste out of medicare. Of course, Obama never explains why, if there is so much waste and fraud in medicare, the governemnt has not done anything about that for all these years.

The truth is that while there is undoubtedly a great deal of waste in teh medicare system, it is not enough to pay for obamacare or even a large portion of it. the truth is further that Obama relies on gimmicks to claim that there will be no net cost for this new system -- for example during the first decade of the proposed plan there are ten years of increased taxes and other revenue generation but on about seven years of increased costs. Even with this gimmick, the CBO still says that we will see about a quarter of a trillion dollars of additional expenses added to the deficit. My guess is that this figure from the CBO is low in the extreme.

Why can't obama address this problem in an incremental fashion. Let's start with reducing waste and fraud and see what savings are really there. Let's also make changes to cut defensive medicine and malpractice insurance costs through tort reform. Those two changes could be done starting immediately. They should reduce costs for everyone immediately. And they should give us some sense of how much fat there really is in the medical system that can be cut and used for expanding healthcare for the uninsurables.

I realize that an honest statement about healthcare from the obamacrats is not likely any time soon. Still, I can dream.