Obama 'austerity'

Rich Lowry:

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Typically, the Obama administration can't explain two things about its gloriously responsible new government program: how to pay for it and how it will achieve savings. Besides that, it's an admirable exercise in fiscal restraint.

Obama sent a letter to Congress last week broaching the idea of more cuts to Medicare and Medicaid than he's already proposed, roughly doubling them from $300 billion to $600 billion over 10 years. That's still not enough. Democrats in Congress are considering getting revenue by ending the tax deduction for employer-provided health care. When John McCain endorsed this proposal last year, the Obama-Biden campaign savaged it as the largest tax increase ever proposed on the middle class.

The only way the Obama program will save money is through the sort of dislocating changes for people currently with coverage that Obama has promised he won't impose. People would be herded into the new public plan Obama endorsed in his letter to Congress. Then, over time, costs could be squeezed through rationing or price controls imposed by an appropriately anodyne-sounding bureaucratic body. Something like the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission that Obama wants to empower to enforce savings unless contravened by a vote of Congress.

Libertarian blogger Virginia Postrel noted a report by the Council of Economic Advisers that plugged for the cost-savings potential of Obama's reform by arguing that "nearly 30 percent of Medicare's costs could be saved without adverse health consequences." Just smoothing out state-by-state disparities in health-care spending would do the trick. If so, Postrel asked, why not begin health-care reform by cutting Medicare while maintaining its quality? Once the federal government has pulled off that nifty feat, it could apply its lessons to a broader reform.

This sensible minimalism is a non-starter, of course -- because the true motive is further nationalizing health care, a decades-old liberal goal.

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Yes the health care "reform" is about control and dependency more than anything else. If Democrats can make the country dependent on rationed health care they can run for the next 100 years against republicans trying to take it away from voters. That it would be worse than what we have now and bankrupt the country is of no consequence to them.