Those Who Forget History…
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 By Marc KilmerIf you really think the health care proposals being debated in DC will cost less than $1 trillion over ten years, the Wall Street Journal today has some history of other government health care programs that should disabuse you of that notion:
The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that [Medicaid's] first-year costs would be $238 million. Instead it hit more than $1 billion, and costs have kept climbing.
Thanks in part to expansions promoted by California’s Henry Waxman, a principal author of the current House bill, Medicaid now costs 37 times more than it did when it was launched—after adjusting for inflation. Its current cost is $251 billion, up 24.7% or $50 billion in fiscal 2009 alone, and that’s before the health-care bill covers millions of new beneficiaries.
Medicare has a similar record. In 1965, Congressional budgeters said that it would cost $12 billion in 1990. Its actual cost that year was $90 billion. Whoops. The hospitalization program alone was supposed to cost $9 billion but wound up costing $67 billion. These aren’t small forecasting errors. The rate of increase in Medicare spending has outpaced overall inflation in nearly every year (up 9.8% in 2009), so a program that began at $4 billion now costs $428 billion.
Tags: Health care, Medicaid
October 21st, 2009 at 7:10 pm
We had a trillion dollars to spend in Iraq, we had a billion dollars to bail out AIG and other inept corporations, so as far as I am concerned, we can can spend $100 billion a year (so yes, a trillion dollars over ten years) so that all Americans can have access to health care.
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:29 pm
You’d have a point if we actually had the money to fund the Iraq War and all those other things. Unfortunately, we borrowed the money for them and we’ll be borrowing the money to pay for this boondoggle. And before you say that it won’t add to the deficit, let me predict that it will cost more than expected, the savings from trimming Medicare won’t materialize, and the out-year costs will be very, very high (the spending on this plan begins three years after enactment and rises every year, leading to ballooning spending after ten years).
And the idea that “all Americans will have access to health care” because of these proposed bills is wrong, as even their sponsors acknowledge. All this money will be spent and there will still be millions of uninsured Americans.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Well, we are going to have to pay for it, eventually. Letting the Bush tax cuts expire is a good start. As for everyone not being covered–I agree, it’s a shortcoming. However, at this point, 15 years after Clinton’s plan was killed and those who killed it broke their promise to come up with their own plan, I am not willing to sacrifice the good on the alter of the perfect.
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:18 am
Yes, we are going to have to pay for all this deficit spending eventually. That’s why it’s a bad idea to add to it.
I guess you and I will differ on whether these proposals are “good” or not. I think they will only make our current problems worse. We certainly need health care reform, but such “reform” should actually fix the problems we see today, not exacerbate them.
October 24th, 2009 at 11:47 am
OK–you write for the Buckeye Institute, my screen name is “token liberal.” If we don’t disagree on this, then what’s the point?