Behold, the Obama Administration’s sales pitch for nationalized health care:
C-Span host STEVE SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?
OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.
So we’ve got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it’s putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off.
So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don’t reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can’t get control of the deficit.
So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it’s too expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We can’t afford it. We’ve got this big deficit. Let’s just keep the health care system that we’ve got now.
Along that trajectory, we will see health care cost as an overall share of our federal spending grow and grow and grow and grow until essentially it consumes everything…
There you have it. We have to save money on health care or else we’ll be financially ruined by the cost of Medicare and Medicaid. And only the government — presumably by forcing helping doctors to make “cost efficient” health care choices — can turn our rising health care costs around and eventually make health care less expensive (while also making it equally available to everyone and miraculously innovative, via stem cells and so forth).
In the same interview, Obama also reprises his Government doesn’t want to be in the car business, but we had to temporarily step in and help them make tough decisions song and dance routine. Yes, “tough decisions” like forcing creditors to lose billions and handing over a majority share of common stock to labor unions.
The way Obama and the Democrats see things, none of the trillions and trillions of dollars they have committed to bailouts, buyouts, and pork during the last four months have contributed one bit to our current credit and debt crisis. Obama’s philosophy of “we have to spend money in order to save money” is incredibly dangerous, and I pray that the American people are willing to stand up and say “NO!” to the massive health care boondoggle looming just over the horizon.
