No Runny Eggs

For those who have read this blog for a while, I’ll give you a moment to put your teeth back in and pick yourself up off of the floor.

Ready?

In a speech to AARP about the proposed national health care plan, Joe Biden said:

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”

For once, I absolutely agree with Joe.  The current course is unsustainable.  We need to make changes soon or we’re going to be in a whole heap of trouble!

Think I’m just some two bit blogging hack who’s just throwing another opinion to the ether?  Don’t think my opinions is that valuable?  Well, don’t trust me then, trust the head of the Congressional Budget Office. 

In his testimony to Congress and in his blog, the Director of the CBO said:

the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. Although great uncertainty surrounds long-term fiscal projections, rising costs for health care and the aging of the population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly under any plausible scenario for current law. (emphasis mine)

That’s right, shocking isn’t it.  The federal budget is on an unsustainable path.  The CBO goes on to explain what the problem with the budget is….take one guess at what is causing the unsustainable problem:

Measured relative to GDP, almost all of the projected growth in federal spending other than interest payments on the debt stems from the three largest entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. For decades, spending on Medicare and Medicaid has been growing faster than the economy. CBO projects that if current laws do not change, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid combined will grow from roughly 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent by 2035. By 2080, the government would be spending almost as much, as a share of the economy, on just its two major health care programs as it has spent on all of its programs and services in recent years.

And this is before putting another $1.5 Trillion minimum of additional costs into the budget for the national health care program!

Later in his speech, Joe went on to lie again telling the folks that they would be able to keep their existing health plan if they wanted:

“They’ll be a deal in there so there’s competition, so what you’ll have in there is you’ll have the ability to go in there and say, ‘Now look, this is the policy I want. This is the one,” Biden said.

Someone should get Joe a copy of the House bill or a subscription to Investors Business Daily.  If he had either, he would note the following:

When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee

It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of “Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage,” the “Limitation On New Enrollment” section of the bill clearly states

“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.

Joe did have one last comment that I agree with him on:

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.

Yes, Joe.  If we continue down this path and are lucky, we may only go bankrupt as a nation.  My bet is that if we follow the advice of you and yours, we’ll commit national suicide!