Friday, July 17, 2009

Congressional Budget Analysts Announce the Health Care Reform Will Require Health Care Reform

The US Congress' budget analysts are saying that paying insurance companies to cover the uninsured will not constitute money-saving reform, but will only multiply the current inefficiencies in the system according to the number of people currently uninsured, which is 47 million and rising, as people lose their jobs.

Congress's chief budget analyst delivered a devastating assessment yesterday of the health-care proposals drafted by congressional Democrats, fueling an insurrection among fiscal conservatives in the House and pushing negotiators in the Senate to redouble efforts to draw up a new plan that more effectively restrains federal spending.

Under questioning by members of the Senate Budget Committee, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, said bills crafted by House leaders and the Senate health committee do not propose "the sort of fundamental changes" necessary to rein in the skyrocketing cost of government health programs, particularly Medicare. On the contrary, Elmendorf said, the measures would pile on an expensive new program to cover the uninsured. WaPost

Now, I hope the US Congress will not conclude that reform is impossible because it requires . . . reform. Let's face it. Everyone and his brother has a vested interest in the exagerated prices of services that cost two hundred dollars in the United States and ten dollars in Brazil. It may actually require everyone in the United States being priced out of the medical market before enough people realize that revolutionary reform is required, not glacial evolutionary reform.

Unfortunately, just as the Foundering Fathers made more provisions for the ownership of guns than for medical care for those accidentally shot, they made no provisions for health care in general. And just as there are many homeless people in the United States, we may well arrive at a point where no one at all has insurance and everyone relies on the "free market", which is what Republicans would favor in any case. Insurance, after all, is a form of socialization of risk and ALL socialism is, of course, intolerable, no matter what essential necessity it provides that can't be provided any other way.

Unfortunately there may come a time when the vast majority of Americans can only receive the health care that they can pay for on their credit cards. That, effectively, is the message our Congresspeople have received from the budget analysts, if we keep on doing what we've always done, but simply multiply it by 115% in order to cover the uninsured.

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