Health Care Reform is Coming!

This week it looks like Congress will vote on passing health care reform using every parliamentary trick they can muster to insure its passage. The real question that has never been asked or articulated is how will health care reform going to be paid for?

The current plan is to reduce Medicare by $500 billion dollars and utilizing various tax increases to fund this massive program. The question that I have is where will the $500 billion dollars savings from Medicare be cut from? Currently the money saved from Medicare will then be spent in the same health care reform measure essentially using the same dollar twice. The president’s own Medicare actuary stated this inconsistency.

The next area is where will all these taxes come from? Currently the debate has centered on the need to pass health care reform and the ramifications if we don’t!

The real debate should be on how will we pay for it, and what happens if the assumptions made by Congress are wrong? If the savings from Medicare don’t materialize and the taxes raised are insufficient to fund this huge expansion in health care then the nation will be saddled with yet another unfunded mandate that will seriously raise the national debt to unsustainable levels.

The president rightly complains about how the Republican passed prescription drug legislation during the Bush presidency, but now they are being disingenuous in the same way.

If this legislation passes and the questions are not asked now then this nation will reap the consequence of our lack of foresight in not asking beforehand. Once it passes then we can only blame ourselves for the disaster waiting us!