With Friends Like These - Healthcare Reform Edition

With the House vote last weekend approving a healthcare reform bill, it seems everyone is concerned about the implications which are admittedly hard to grasp from a 2,000 page document written by lawyers.

It's only natural that people might turn to other sources in the media to help them anticipate the results of this effort and exactly what those results might look like. It's also the case that there are many people with a favorable personal view of President Obama and a negative view of right-wing commentators like Limbaugh and Beck. I get it, you don't believe anything these guys say. In fact, you are inclined to believe the opposite of whatever Glenn Beck says. Fine. I'm not going to change your mind in one blog post.

So how about listening to what some who are supportive of healthcare reform have to say about the current proposal?

First, here's David Leonhardt of the New York Times:

Making the medical system more efficient is, in short, about saving lives and giving Americans a long overdue raise. It is arguably the single most important step that the federal government could take to improve people’s lives.

And the bill that the House of Representatives passed last weekend simply does not get it done.

And John Cassidy of the New Yorker*:

So what does it all add up to? The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment to help provide health coverage for the vast majority of its citizens. I support this commitment, and I think the federal government’s spending priorities should be altered to make it happen. But let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t.

Both men are convinced that the current reform will do nothing to reduce medical costs and despite massive increases in spending. But wait, you say, every Democrat on television takes great pains to tell us this bill is paid for. Here's Cassidy:

Look a bit more closely, and you find that more than half of the Medicare savings (two hundred and twenty-nine billion dollars) come from cutting payments to providers of services under the regular program; most of the rest (a hundred and seventy billion dollars) come from changing the way payments are set in the Medicare Advantage program. Does anybody really believe that these savings will materialize? For decades now, Congress has been promising to reduce the growth of Medicare outlays, and yet every year they continue to go up. The reasons are straightforward: the population is aging; seniors are politically active; and health-care treatments, particularly for the aging, continue to evolve in complex and costly ways.

From non-existent cost savings to mythical revenue sources that will never exist. The health reform proposal has some serious critics even among those that are in favor of reforming the current system.

Don't take my word for it, or Glenn Beck's. Go to the links and read what Leonhardt of the New York Times & Cassidy of The New Yorker have to say. Then try to come back and explain to me exactly how this proposal is supposed to help.

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* I blogged about Cassidy's piece a while back but thought it was worth revisiting after the House vote.