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Thursday, July 30, 2009

Gov't-Run Health Care = Skyrocketing Costs

If the goal in reforming health care is to reduce the cost for most Americans so we can provide coverage for all Americans, then why would you turn health care over to the government?

Consider what government has already done with Medicare and Medicaid, two programs full of waste and mismanagement, programs that are nearly bankrupt.

Rudy Boschwitz, who served in the Senate from 1978 to 1991 and was a member of the Budget Committee throughout that time, and Tim Penny, who served in the House from 1983 to 1995, examine the government's track record with managing health care programs in an op-ed column published in Investor's Business Daily.

From their column:
What kind of impact did Medicare, the first large government health insurance plan have in budgetary terms? Medicare rose from $5.1 billion in 1968 to $436.0 billion in 2007 an astounding increase of 85.5 times over the 40-year period. Will Obama-Care be better?

Beware of government estimates about the future cost of ObamaCare. When Medicare was being considered in the mid-1960s, the government projected that the outlays for the program 25 years down the road would be $10 billion. Instead, in 1990, 25 years later, the outlays were $107 billion. Government estimates were off by a factor of more than 10!

Medicaid, the other large medical program currently in effect, outdid Medicare. Medicaid outlays in 1968 were $1.8 billion. In 2007 they had risen to $190.6 billion, an increase in dollar terms of 105.9 times.

And that is only the Federal outlay number. There is a roughly equal Medicaid amount spent by the states due to federal mandates. Without those mandates we would not be reading about the large deficits that most states endure.

The idea of expanding the federal role in the medical arena is truly fiscally irresponsible. The claim that money will be saved through government competition with the private insurance system (with government setting the rules!) is the height of fantasy.
Read the full column, "History Of Gov't-Run Health Care Is A Study In Skyrocketing Costs," at the newspaper's Web site.

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