Saturday, December 19, 2009
David Brooks On The Senate Healthcare Bill
David Brooks does a pretty good job of teasing out the good and the bad in this bill. Additionally, he reminds us that a Republican President and a Republican Congress passed a prescription drug benefit without really figuring out how to pay for it (as opposed to the proponents of this measure who seem to have thought through offsets, though they rely on Congress resisting the urge to act like itself). The current fascination among Republican leaders with deficit neutrality rings somewhat hollow in the face of that vote.
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2 comments:
Mr. brooks says "It spends a lot of money to cover the uninsured, but to help pay for it, it also includes serious Medicare cuts and whopping tax increases — the tax on high-cost insurance plans alone will raise $1.3 trillion in the second decade."
As unemployment rises and will continue to do so, and as companies flee the United States to countries with more business friendly environments upon whom will these increased taxes be levied?
Obviously Mr. Brooks and our elected officials have forgotten the law of unintended consequences.
Smoothfur--I hear you--but what I think Brooks was trying to do is contrast the mechanisms for "paying for" this bill with what Republicans conjured for the medicare drub benefit. In this case, we're all talking about obvious, predictable UNINTENDED consequences. In the drug bill, there was nothing unintended about them at all--when you fail to try to pay for a program, its contribution to the deficit is a given and predictable.
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