Health Care Reform Lies Start To Unravel Already

During the whole recent Congressional and public debate on Obama's health care reform plans, the Democratic wing of the political class claimed that only the rich would get soaked for the extra trillion dollars in government expense that the program would generate. Their strategy, typical of the political class, is to set one group of Americans against another, in this case rich vs. poor, to increase their power and decrease our freedom. Their reasoning is that as long as we can convince the middle and lower classes that only the rich will get hit for the costs of this reform, they can sell this defective approach.

A little bit of history: recently the new customer welcome center in DC opened to some fanfare. It is supposed to be a pretty nice place. It should be, given that it missed its construction budget number by about 100%, i.e. this relatively small government project cost about twice as much as originally forecasted. On a larger scale, the Federal "Big Dig" road project in Boston was originally supposed to cost between $2 and $3 billion. At last count, the actual costs were over $14 billion. There are untold similar budget nightmares that political class projects have incurred over the years. Nothing they ever do hits the cost estimates they sell to the American public.

Back to health care reform. Looks like the trillion-dollar-only-the-rich will pay lie is already coming apart. This weekend Treasury Secretary Geithner and National Economic Council Director Summers hinted that taxes may have to be raised on ALL Americans to pay for Obama's healthcare reform proposal (AP story listed on Earthlink's home page). In other words, it is not only the rich that will pay for this, we will ALL pay for this since it looks like the trillion dollar estimate is too low already and the program has not even started. As we know from the book, Economic Freedom = Political Freedom. Obama's program will cost far more than the trillion dollars he said it would cost(several credible independent sources have already reached this conclusion, now political insiders are basically saying they are right, a trillion is too low), all Americans, not just the rich will pay, and our freedom takes another hit as we send more and more of our wealth and freedom to Washington.

Tomorrow we will look at another fallacy of Obama's reform program, i.e. what is the root cause problem he is trying to solve? (Hint: he does not know).