Today's nomination for Idiot of the Day goes to Tom Daschle, for his self-serving pronoucement that reforming health care will spur the US economy. Now, I'm sure Tom is as self-serving as any other [ex-]politician, but seriously, you'd have to be a moron to take that statement at face value.
Let's look at Obama's health-care reform plan, in a nutshell. He wants to make medical insurance mandatory for everyone, and he wants to make businesses pay for it (directly through penalties or indirectly through increased taxes). By socializing medial insurance, you'll get a standard baseline coverage plan for everyone, but at a higher overhead cost (because the government is horrible managing costs in enormous bureaucracies). So the change would increase health-care costs for businesses, while simultaneously increasing health-care taxation on businesses.
Maybe the great and mighty chosen one would like to explain how doubly increasing health-care costs is going to "spur the economy". Alternatively, maybe "spur" in this context means "trample and beat mercilessly until dead". All things considered, though, I'll go for option three: Tom Daschle is a self-serving, lying moron, and my nomination for Idiot of the Day.
Friday, December 5, 2008
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There’s one way health care reform could improve the economy. It could increase labor mobility. There are people working jobs that are not an ideal fit because they cannot keep their current insurance even if they keep paying the premiums.
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest of it, it’s too bad politicians can’t be honest. This might increase your taxes a little. It might not be the optimal decision for your portfolio, but you will live in a society that does something to help the poor people get healthcare.
Even if Obama and the Democrats sell their plan as taking money from the middle class and using it to buy their health insurance, I hope that they actually pursue a policy to help the needy and leave everyone else alone.