You likely received a letter from Senator Kay Hagan today that failed to explain her reasons for supporting the healthcare act. The “reasons” included:

  • Currently, many people are not insured and costs are too high; analogously, eggs are high in cholesterol, so you need to eat a stick of butter every day.
  • The new plan will insure more people, provide better coverage, and cost less for individuals and employers; analogously, Dr. Who opened a stargate leading to a new and bountiful dimension.
  • Government needs to run the insurance business instead of insurance companies; analogously, Cheney-Rumsfeld 2012.

    I had to take a break. Much more credible were the reports I read from the Cato Institute earlier this week for another project. Jagadeesh Gokhale and David Schoenbrod published a complaint March 10 that the OMB was not giving the public the information needed by independent economists to analyze its predicted outcomes and verify questionable figures. They wrote:

    The White says, in essence, that the public can’t be trusted to decide what to make of this budget information. So it censors the flow and tells us what to think. This is talking down to the public.

    The Asheville Tribune printed the following summary:

    Back in 2009, Gokhale blew the cover off political promises about healthcare reform, at least for the few who cared to read. He emphasized the distinction between phase-in costs and full-blown costs, and called attention to the erroneous application of cash-flow accounting for entitlement programs. He conservatively calculated the difference between future outlays and new revenue streams to be $13.6 trillion. In his minimum-cost analysis, he optimistically assumed healthcare cost would increase at the normal rate of inflation, an assumption he felt was unrealistically stretching it.

    He next looked at how this conservative estimate would be shouldered by the rich. If only those earning $200,000 or more were to pick up costs, their taxes would increase 50 percent. However, soaking the rich to “shore up” Medicare and Social Security, as the president also promised, would require an additional 328 percent tax increase on this group.

    Gokhale illuminated, “Most households making between $200,000 and $500,000 per year would not have enough money to pay their federal, state, and local tax bills, much less eat. Rich households in California or New York would not be able to pay their tax bills regardless of their incomes. And a family of four living in a low-tax state (South Dakota) would need to gross almost $900,000 per year to have enough income left over to reach the poverty line. In fact, there is no mathematical configuration of taxes on the current rich alone – including additional levies on the ‘super-rich’ making more than $1 million per year – that is compatible with putting the nation’s entitlement programs and the new healthcare plan on a sustainable course.”

    For a nice dose of credible sanity in this age of unsatisfactory answers, the links at http://www.cato.org/federal-budget-policy are highly recommended.