Fix Health Care Policy

The President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is not set to release its final recommendations on how best to tackle deficit spending and entitlement reform until December 1. However, several of its members have already gone public with proposals to reduce runaway spending and put Medicare and Medicaid, two of the fastest-growing entitlement programs, on the road to solvency.

The commission co-chairs, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, released a report that takes several positive steps in reforming Medicare, including opting to repeal the Sustainable Growth Formula. Alice Rivlin and Representative Paul Ryan (R–WI), also members of the commission, released transformative, long-term solutions to Medicare and Medicaid that would better serve patients and reduce the tremendous upward pressure these programs place on federal spending. (more…)

Tags: debt commission, entitlement spending, Medicaid, Medicare, sustainable growth rate formula, unfunded obligations

The president’s debt commission had its first meeting this week, and all of the talk was of getting serious about putting our fiscal house in order, with everything “on the table” for consideration.

There’s no arguing with the need to get serious. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if the Obama budget were adopted in full, just the interest on the national debt would exceed $900 billion in 2020 and consume one out of every five dollars in federal revenue. To put that in perspective, in 2007, before the financial crisis hit with full force, interest payments on debt stood at $237 billion, or just 9 percent of total tax collections. A sudden and steep rise in the percentage of governmental revenue dedicated to servicing past excess consumption is a clear warning sign to lenders and credit-rating agencies that a country’s finances are approaching the point of no return.

Unfortunately, the timeline for taking corrective action may have shortened even in the past few weeks and days. What began as a slow-motion crumble of Greece’s economic house of cards is now threatening to become a serious global crisis. The flight from sovereign debt risk is now spreading to other vulnerable, highly leveraged countries, including Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. The implications for European economic recovery are ominous. And, if Europe’s economy slides backward again into a deep recession, no part of the global economy will be completely spared from the fallout, including the United States.

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Tags: "on the table", Congressional Budget Office, debt commission, massive spending, Medicare, ObamaCare

Suddenly, the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders seem to want health-care news stories to fall off of the front page.

This week, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman abruptly cancelled a high-profile hearing he had called just days earlier to berate corporate CEOs who dared to tell their investors that the health-care bill would raise their costs. It seems to have dawned on Congressman Waxman and his staff that his transparent effort to intimidate anyone who tells the truth about the legislation could actually backfire on him and turn into a PR disaster.

The Democratic contention that the bill actually lowers costs for American business is not supported by any rigorous analysis that would justify use in auditable corporate accounting methods. The Business Roundtable study that many Obamacare advocates like to cite as proof of the bill’s savings provides no such proof at all. The prediction of cost savings in the study, from the mostly minor provisions in the legislation aimed at “delivery system reform,” are highly speculative at best. Indeed, the study itself notes the potential for much higher costs and cites many cost-cutting provisions that are not in the new health law. (more…)

Tags: debt commission, deficit, economic crisis, House Energy and Commerce Committee, ObamaCare, Rep. Henry Waxman, retiree drug-benefit coverage, value-added tax (VAT)