The Patriot Post® · Obama Blames the Debt on ... Health Care?
Speaking at the National Governors Association Reception on Monday, Barack Obama made this very misguided claim regarding the national debt:
> “The real problem that we have when it comes to debt is very simple. It is that our population is getting older, and we use a lot of health care. And health care, we spend more for less, frankly, than most other advanced nations, partly because we do a lot of emergency room care. Some of it is because we over-prescribe, we over-test. Some of it is we drive innovation and technology and people always want the best stuff. But that costs money. Some of it is because the accident of how our health care system evolved means that we’ve got private sector involvement and they’ve got to make a profit, and they’ve got overhead, and so forth. So there are a whole bunch of reasons, but essentially we spend about 6 to 8 percent more than our wealthy nation counterparts per capita on health care. That delta, that difference, is our debt. And that is the reason why, since I came into office, I was interested in reforming health care.”
In a sense, he’s right. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government spent more than $1 trillion on major health care programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, in fiscal year 2015. That’s amounts to nearly half of all mandatory spending ($2.3 trillion). He’s also right in that innovation isn’t cheap — America’s health care system didn’t become second to none through sheer luck. Despite its kinks, our level of care remains the envy of the world. So the fact we spend “6 to 8 percent more than our wealthy national counterparts per capita on health care” shouldn’t come as a surprise, nor should we apologize for it (he’s always welcome to experience health care elsewhere).
More to the point, Obama misses the overarching issue. He added, “You can get rid of all … discretionary spending. It won’t matter. Because the big-ticket item is Medicare, Medicaid. And in the private sector, the big-ticket item, that’s where the inflation is, is on the health care side.” True. But remember, ObamaCare — forced on us by Democrats — vastly expands Medicare and Medicaid, the costs of which are projected to further balloon in the ensuing years (not to mention other programs like Social Security). So Obama has only himself to blame. Health care does need reform. But putting more people on the government dole and then blaming the private sector for the deficit it creates is not the way to do it. We should get the government out of health care altogether and focus on incentivizing health care providers to compete. That would truly lower the deficit.