Obamacare and Deficits

In campaign-mode fashion, President Obama held a rally at Arcadia University on Monday to sell his plan for health care reform. Filled with the usual rhetoric and emotional, Obama made some many claims about the fiscal implications of the current legislation in Congress.

Probably the most outrageous claim was a bill that will cost over $100 billion dollars a year will be deficit-neutral. As David Brooks from the NY Times points out, this “neutrality” is simply a bait and switch tactic”

One of the reasons the bill appears deficit-neutral in the first decade is that it begins collecting revenue right away but doesn’t have to pay for most benefits until 2014. That’s 10 years of revenues to pay for 6 years of benefits, something unlikely to happen again unless the country agrees to go without health care for four years every decade.

Combine this new spending with the burdensome regulations like individual mandates to purchase insurance and fines on small-business who don’t offer coverage and you have a recipe for a fiscal nightmare.

Instead , President Obama should go back to the drawing board and embrace common-sense alternatives such as allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines, medical malpractice reform and tax code reform.