CMS Report on the Health Care Bill
Megan McArdle has a great post on the CMS post. Bascially, there is no magic bullet to cut medical costs. Benefits are going to get cut and costs are going to go up.
I really don't need the report to tell me this. Here is the common sense answer -- before this administration embarked on the health care fiasco, we all pretty mich knew that Medicaire and Medicaid bankrupt and was going to blow a huge hole (McArdle's term) in the budget. So, since this bill at its heart is really just an expansion of Medicaire/Medicaid to cover more people, how can we expect it to do anything but blow an even bigger hole in the budget.
By the way, years ago I wrote:
...health care is not like failed Great Society housing programs. In those housing programs, only the poor got crappy government housing "” the rest of us kept what we had. Universal health care is different, because it will effectively be like forcing everyone to move into the housing projects.
Now that we know what is in the actual bills, I stand by this prediction. Here is the poll question I would still like to see:
Would you support a system of government-run universal health care that guaranteed health care access for all Americans, but would result in you personally getting inferior care than you get today in terms of longer wait times, more limited doctor choices, and with a higher probabilities of the government denying you certain procedures or medicines you have access to today.
