"The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." - Margaret Thatcher
The Denver Post reports:
Temporarily short on money, Colorado has declared a fiscal emergency and delayed payments to doctors and clinics taking care of the state's neediest patients.
Under state law, the Medicaid department ...
Proponents of the health control legislation, HR 3590, claimed it would reduce the federal deficit. First of all, this desirable if government cuts spending. In any case, Veronique de Rugy at the Mercatus Center shows that the health care bill's deficit reduction is tiny:
The above chart by Mercatus Center senior ...
Key points about HR 3590 from Grace-Marie Turner in Soaring ObamaCare costs break the bank:
"The Congressional Budget Office recently issued a revised estimate showing the law will cost $115 billion more than it projected the week before it was enacted."
"A report by the Obama administration's own actuary, ...
From Reason.tv:
One of the main selling points of health care reform [HR 3590] was that it would cut the federal deficit by a supposed $143 billion over the next decade and a trillion-plus dollars in the one after that.
For references on the points made in the video, see ...
Keith Hennessey reviews the disagreement between Paul Krugman (on one side) and Rep. Paul Ryan, New Gingrich, and John Goodman (on the other) about how to change Medicare so it does not bankrupt the country. How much is Medicare spending? Consider what Hennessey points out:
The policy reality is that if ...
Some choice words from Jeffrey S. Flier, Dean of Harvard's Medical School. Some excerpts from his Wall Street Journal article:
Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for ...
From the Wall Street Journal:
...the bills are fiscally dishonest, using every budget gimmick and trick in the book: Leave out inconvenient spending, back-load spending to disguise the true scale, front-load tax revenues, let inflation push up tax revenues, promise spending cuts to doctors and hospitals that have no record of ...
Harry Reid's Senate health bill up for a procedural vote on Saturday, which could allow it to move forward to debate. (Yet Republicans are pushing to read the whole thing, which could take 34 hours!) In any case, be wary of how this bill will cut the deficit: remember how ...
The Wall Street Journal has a good summary of how government programs always exceed their spending estimates. Here's a chart:
The article concludes:
The lesson here is that spending on nearly all federal benefit programs grows relentlessly once they are established. This history won't stop Democrats bent on ramming their entitlement into ...
This video by Reason.tv reminds us that politicians are terrible at predicting costs of their programs.
Related video: Obama Care and America’s Entitlement Kids.
