The Washington Times editorializes today on the Obama plan for government-run medicine, pointing to Congressional Budget Office reports showing it radically explodes the size of the federal budget deficit and achieves so-called "savings" only by forcing doctors and hospitals to make less.
Click here to read the editorial, or if you are in the metro D.C. area, pick up a copy of The Washington Times. The Times writes, in part:
…States are worrying about the fiscal impact of changes to the health care system. Governors from across the political spectrum realize they will have to pick up a major part of the tab for these supposed cost savings. In the Senate Finance Committee plan, the federal government would pay for the expanded Medicaid costs of the new health care benefits for possibly five years. After that, the states would have to carry their normal Medicaid cost share of 43 percent.
Gov. Haley Barbour, Mississippi Republican, warned at the annual National Governors Association meeting on Sunday that the change to expand the Medicaid system, "would increase spending on Medicaid by 50 percent, and that’s money we don’t have. And other states don’t have it either." Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee worried the program would be "the mother of all unfunded mandates."
Montana’s Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer hit the nail on the head. "The governors are concerned about unfunded mandates. . . . Well if they want to reform health care," he said about big spenders in Washington, "they should figure out what the rules are and how they are going to pay for it." Unfortunately, that’s not how policy is made in the nation’s capital.
