According to the Wall Street Journal, a poll from last weekend shows that 68% of American voters have health-insurance coverage they rate good or excellent. While President Obama says his plan will reduce costs, 53% of those polled believe it will have the opposite effect. And 50% of those polled fear that if Congress passes health-care reform, it will lead to a decline in the quality of that care.
Those concerns are well founded and do not even address the Health Reform’s future costs to taxpayers. The graphic to the left uses numbers from the Congressional Budget Office and illustrates that while estimates only project out costs for the next 10 years, the Health Reform costs will continue to grow disproportionately compared to revenues. That spells growing trouble for taxpayers for years to come.
What is more, when it comes to spending projections has the Congressional Budget Office ever come in under budget? The CBO estimated that Medicare would cost $3.1 billion in 1965, when the real cost was $6.8 billion.
Fast forward to today. Medicare spending the first 9 months of this year was $314 billion and is growing at 10% annually. Simply put, Medicare is a fiscal disaster that some in Washington promote a model for Health Care Reform. Thank goodness, the government was not able to push Health Reform through before the August recess, as they intended, before the public could have a chance to contemplate what is being done and how that will effect their and their children’s futures.
