Health Care Reform is Pure Expense

Douglas Elmendorf, chief of the Congressional Budget Office, said this of the leading Democratic health care proposals in the House and Senate: "In the legislation that has been reported, we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount and, on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs."

In other words, the proposed reforms are MORE EXPENSIVE than the current system, NOT LESS! How did that happen? How did we take a national mandate to control health care expenses and screw it into a system that costs more? This is legislative failure, pure and simple.

Our history of predicting what government run health care programs will cost is tragically painful to review:

• The cost of Medicare is a good place to begin. At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly "conservative" estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.
• Anticipating a 3.5-percent annual inflation rate, government actuaries predicted that the cost of a day’s hospital stay by 1985 would be $155 and that the hospital insurance portion of Medicare would cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual average cost of a hospital day by 1985 was over $600; instead of $9 billion, the hospital-insurance program cost $63 billion in 1990.

(above items from a 1993 article)

If we can't predict medical expenses with any confidence, and the current reform plans don't predict any savings to begin with, aren't current reforms relaly just an open liability that could become excessively huge in the near future? How can we afford that?!