All of this is why the national-health-care debate is so outrageous. At some point we have to get serious about solving Medicare by limiting middle-class benefits and funding the program properly. There is no other way out. We can grow our way out of the Social Security deficit if we pursue pro-growth policies that maintain low tax and inflation rates. Prospects for that don’t look any too good right now, though it could be done. But government health care is nothing but a massive, unfunded, middle-class entitlement problem. (The poor are already in Medicaid.)
Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) proposes to solve health care by limiting employer tax breaks. He’s on to something, but he’s only got half the story. All the tax breaks for health care should go to individuals and small businesses. Let them shop around for the best health deal wherever they can find it with essentially pre-tax dollars.
Additionally, insurance companies should be permitted to sell their products across state lines. And popular health savings accounts -- which combine investor retirements with proper insurance by removing the smothering red tape -- should be promoted. This approach of consumer choice and market competition will strengthen our private health-care system.
So private enterprise can coexist with public health care and not be crowded out by the heavy-handed overreach of government. But the Obama Democrats are determined to force through a state-run system that will bankrupt the country.
I’m not somebody who obsesses about the national debt or deficit. But I have to admit: Today’s spending-and-borrowing is blowing my mind. As a share of GDP, we’re looking at double-digit deficits as far as the eye can see. Over the next ten years, the CBO predicts federal debt in the hands of the public will absorb 80 percent of GDP. And that doesn’t include the real cost of state-run health care. Other than the temporary financial conditions surrounding WWII, we’ve never seen anything like this.
The president’s grandiose government-takeover-and-control strategies are going to make things worse and worse -- that is, unless members of that tiny band known as the Republican party can stand on their hind legs and just say no. The Republicans must come up with some pro-competition, private-enterprise alternatives for health, energy, education, taxes, and trade that will meet the yearning of voter-taxpayers for a return to private-enterprise American prosperity and opportunity.
Free-market competition will lower costs in health care just as it has every place else. It also will grow the economy. The GOP must return to this basic conservative principle and reject Obama’s massive government assault.