The CBO came out today with projections for a House plan that does include a 'robust' public option.
Their score is that the plan would cost $871 billion up front and when savings are included would actually reduce the deficit.
Notice that this is not so far from what the Baucus bill produced after a two month delay in the Senate Finance Committee would cost and save, only that bill was claimed as some kind of a 'breakthrough' because of cost savings that could allegedly attract GOP support. Which it did, exactly one Republican.
The claims that health care reform with a public option will run up the deficit have been punctured by today's report, in fact deficit hawks should jump on it as a way to cut tens of billions of dollars out of the long term projected deficit. This means then that there is no longer any good reason for opposing health care reform, including a public option. The only real reason anyone would is if they are still putting the interests of the insurance industry ahead of the interests of American patients (which will sooner or later by virtually all of us.) A distressingly large number of members of Congress are indeed going to be doing just that, but this pretty much makes it clear that that is what they are doing in that case.
The deficit hawks were not concerned till someone suggested that they were neglecting their watch. When someone else decided they were going to take steps to correct the situation, we get this crying wolf BS?
ReplyDeleteThe problem is not the deficit. It's that nothing has been done to stop the irresponsible practices that allowed it to get out of control. Action must be taken to get at the forces that are driving up costs.
The economy is too fragile to talk about cutting back any further in social safety nets during the middle of a Great Depression.
Go for the root causes of out-of- control profits and speculation. That's the way to correct and right the imbalance to get us back on the right course.