Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal Online
‘Every argument has been made. Everything that there is to say about health care has been said, and just about everybody has said it,” President Obama declared yesterday as he urged Democrats to steamroll his plan through Congress. What hasn’t been heard, however, is even a shred of White House honesty about the true costs of ObamaCare, or its fiscal consequences.
Nearby, we reprint Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s remarks at the health summit last week, which methodically dismantle the falsehoods—there is no other way of putting it—that Mr. Obama has used to sell “reform” and repeated again yesterday. No one in the political class has even tried to refute Mr. Ryan’s arguments, though he made them directly to the President and his allies, no doubt because they are irrefutable. If Democrats are willing to ignore overwhelming public opposition to ObamaCare and pass it anyway, then what’s a trifling dispute over a couple of trillion dollars?
At his press conference yesterday, Mr. Obama claimed that “my proposal would bring down the cost of health care for millions—families, businesses and the federal government.” He said it is “fully paid for” and “brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion over the next two decades.” Never before has a vast new entitlement been sold on the basis of fiscal responsibility, and one reason ObamaCare is so unpopular is that Americans understand the contradiction between untold new government subsidies and claims of spending restraint. They know a Big Con when they hear one.
Mr. Obama’s fiscal assertions are possible only because of the fraudulent accounting and budget gimmicks that Democrats spent months calibrating. Readers can find the gory details in Mr. Ryan’s pre-emptive rebuttal nearby, though one of the most egregious deceptions is that the bill counts 10 years of taxes but only six years of spending.
See Wall Street Journal Online for full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704548604575097602436388116.html
With all due respect, Paul D. Ryan expects us to take him seriously on deficit reduction & trust his cost analysis?
In 2003, US National Debt was $6.7 trillion, up $562 billion over 2002. Despite this, in 2003, Paul Ryan voted for the UNFUNDED GOP Medicare Rx Modernization Act (MMA). You read it – UNFUNDED. A massive health entitlement program that benefited drug & insurance companies with $200+ billion windfall profits, but sent Rx prices soaring – wasn’t paid for, in a year with already ballooning US deficits.
GOP lied to Congress that MMA would cost $400 billion to get it passed. To-date cost to US taxpayers is $1.2 trillion & $7 trillion added to Medicare’s unfunded liability. Even before its full cost was known, a 2004 Duke Law & Technology Analysis stated “the estimated $540 billion price tag on the MMA will have far-reaching economic effects that will likely force legislators to make fundamental changes to the tax system in the future and may ultimately cause the healthcare system in the United States to falter.” You bet it did.
And Paul Ryan voted YES, voted for screwing American seniors with Rx prices at double what the rest of the world pays, voted to restrict the government from negotiating lower Rx drug prices for seniors & didn’t mind dumping $7 trillion into what is now $38 trillion unfunded liability…what he calls: “empty promises to my parents’ generation, our generation, our kids’ generation.
Yeah, Mr. Ryan, “empty promises” you helped grow. Now, to fix what you helped do to America’s seniors, you’re promoting a budget that renegs on government’s promise to seniors by cutting $650 billion off Medicare over 10 years, then kills Medicare…and replaces it with a voucher system which will prematurely kill seniors when its face value can’t buy nuts in a high-priced private insurance world and won’t keep pace with rising costs.
You don’t have any credibility to critique FUNDED Obamacare and the CBO, when you approved UNFUNDED Bushcare’s $1.2 trillion cost & $7 trillion liability & over 8 yrs voted for programs that added $4 trillion to the national debt. Your sudden onset “fiscal responsibility” can’t be trusted. We have to protect America’s seniors – you have an ANTI-seniors, ANT-public health BUT PRO-business voting record on issues. Surprise!
Last Friday, 80 leading US health economists urged Congress to pass Obamacare, citing a “system in crisis” and “ultimately unsustainable state and federal budget deficits”. I’m listening to them.