Mickey Kaus has been following the Obamacare debate much more closely, and deeply, than I, and although I disagree with his bottom line — he’s for it — he has cogently skewered most of the deficit/debt/cost curve bending defenses of it. See, for example, his recent post arguing that the CBO lives in an “alternate universe.”
“Is any CBO analysis that doesn’t include the doctors’ fix really worth paying much attention to?” he asks, and answers no. “It’s an analysis of a fantasy world.”
He concludes:
The prediction that Democratic health care bill will not reduce the deficit over the long run is about as safe a year-end prediction as you could make. Even with all the budget gimmickry, it wouldn’t help cut the budget much….
Fine. Better than fine. But then comes this P.S. in the same paragraph:
P.S.: I’m not saying that the reform (which I favor for non-deficit reasons) won’t help set the stage for at least some cost-restraint in the future. As Hendrik Hertzberg and E.J. Dionne argue, it should be easier to take future action to control medical costs after everyone’s covered — then we’ll all be in the soup together, and it will be harder for distinct demographic groups (e.g. seniors on Medicare) to argue that they are being singled out for sacrifice unfairly or unnecessarily. But the administration’s claim is that the bill as written will by itself cut costs so much that it will reduce the deficit–something that seems plausible only in the artificial alternate universe of the CBO.
But wait a minute. I must be missing something here. Does Mickey really mean to argue that simply the fact of passing a bill that cuts half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, among other atrocities, will make it harder “seniors on Medicare … to argue that they are being singled out for sacrifice unfairly or unnecessarily?”
True, a number of groups, organizations (think the private insurance industry), and individuals will be injured by this legislation, but I don’t see how that makes it harder for old people to argue that cutting $500 billion from Medicare singles them out for especially harsh treatment.
Empirical test: let’s see if their complaints diminish and if their complaint about the severe injury to them is diluted by the injuries to others.
