Obamacare Isn't Medicine for Deficit

Avik Roy, a savvy health care analyst in New York City who writes an excellent blog on health policy, took the time to talk with me for The Heartland Institute’s Health Care News podcast about what we learned last week when it comes to the White House’s fraudulent case for Obamacare. It’s well worth a listen.

[audio: https://www.heartland.org/bin/media/podcasts/HealthCare/hcnpodcast12.mp3]

In case you missed it — because for some reason, the Washington media types didn’t find time to cover this story — Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf offered an astounding rejection of the notion that the new health care regime, which President Obama frequently cited as a profound and necessary deficit-lowering measure, does anything to improve America’s deficit picture.

This is less news to you, of course. But it’s newsworthy because of who’s saying it. As Keith Hennessey put it, “Never before have I seen a CBO Director so bluntly refute the policy claims of a President and his Budget Director.”

Despite the best efforts of OMB chief Peter Orszag and others, the spin that Obamacare was a budgetary cure has already been revealed as a complete falsehood, even before the implementation costs of the vast majority of its policies are fully known. As Roy writes:

At this point, there are only two camps of honest people: those who believe Obamacare will blow up the budget, and that this is a problem; and those who believe that Obamacare will blow up the budget, and that this is not a problem (because wealth redistribution is more important, and because the wealthy can be taxed more if needed).

The more we learn about what is in this bill, the more we see how disastrous it will be for this country, and how wrongheaded its approach is to solving our health care problems.

Read more at Health Care News.

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