Scoring Universal Health Care

Repugnants leaped on the Congressional Budget Office's initial cost estimate of $1.6 trillion over ten years for universal health care with glee, saying it was a deal killer, but the legislation scored by CBO did not include a government health insurance option or a mandate for employers to provide worker health insurance or pay a $750 fee for each full-time worker not covered. Now that Senator Kennedy's Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee has submitted a complete version of the bill, the CBO has priced it at $611.4 billion over ten years and estimated coverage at 97% of all Americans. That is less than the Pentagon's single fiscal year 2009 request for $766.5 billion*. The vast estimate improvement has prompted even the AMA to reverse course on opposing a public/private system, calling it "the American model". Rhetoric aside, progressives will have to get the legislation past the obstructionists who almost certainly will try to filibuster any solution with a "socialist" element. AP obtained a copy of a letter containing the new cost estimate Senators Kennedy and Dodd circulated to other members of the Committee.

*estimate provided by respected veteran journalist Chalmers Johnson. According to Johnson official figures are notoriously unreliable. 30-40% of the Puzzle Palace's budget is "black" or secret. DOD has yet to comply with the Federal Fiscal Management Improvement Act that required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors. The US outspends its nearest military rivals, China and Russia by a factor of 10, or more than the entire world combined ($600 billion out of $1.1 trillion, 2004 estimate). "Military Keynesianism" as Johnson calls it, was enshrined in the National Security Council's Report 68 drafted in 1950 and basically followed to this day. The report concluded, "...the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living." We are slowly finding out that Cold War ideological notion is not true in the long term.