Bloomberg News reports on Barack Obama’s New Mexico town hall appearance yesterdday:
President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.
The sustaianable approach to government spending in Obamaland is the imposition of a massive new government program expanding on such past successes as Medicare and Medicaid. The logic is Orwellian:
In his New Mexico appearance, the president pledged to work with Congress to shore up entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. He also said he was confident that the House and Senate would pass health-care overhaul bills by August.
“Most of what is driving us into debt is health care, so we have to drive down costs,” he said.
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Taking questions from the audience, Obama repeated his stance that he wants legislation to overhaul the health-care system finished before the end of the year, saying it is vital to the economy.
Health-care costs are driving up the nation’s debt and burdening entitlement programs such as Medicare, the government-run insurance program for those 65 and older and the disabled.
(The full text of Obama’s remarks at his New Mexico appearance is here.) Peter Orszag is the administration’s budgetary point man on the reformation of the medical system that is in the works. Although it’s a bit rash to declare a lie of the day before Nancy Pelosi has finished up her public appearances, I don’t think that even she can exceed the prevarication accomplished by Orszag in his Wall Street Journal column:
To transform our health-care system so that it improves efficiency and increases value, we need to undertake comprehensive health-care reform, and the president is committed to getting that done this year. Once we do, we will put the nation on a sustainable fiscal path and build a new foundation for our economy for generations to come.
Yesterday’s Journal editorial does a good job of translating and refuting the rest of Orszag’s column today. The Journal expresses skepticism that the Obama Administration is smart enough to engineer more efficient medical practices out of D.C. Yet the budgetary challenges presented by Medicare and Medicaid are only the beginning.
Put to one side the tissue of lies in which Obama’s treatment of the budget is now shrouded. Evan Newmark’s Journal Mean Street post on “Obama’s big fat fibbing budget” ably exposes them.
The Obama administration seeks to expand on the Medicare and Medicaid programs with its “public option” insurance program. The proposition that Obama’s massive new health care entitlement program contributes to “a sustainable fiscal path,” as Orszag intimates in the concluding paragraph of his Journal column, is a mind-numbing whopper. Newmark coincidenatlly observes:
On Tuesday, it was [Treasury Seceratry Timothy] Geithner’s turn to dribble out the bad news. He reported that both Medicare and Social Security were rapidly running out of money. In fact, Medicare would be broke by 2017-and that the only way to keep it solvent was to “control runaway growth” in health-care spending. Apparently, such control means offering health care to all those Americans that can’t afford it.
Can anyone in his right mind believe that Obamacare is the path to “a sustainable fiscal path,” or fail to understand that any program promoted by such a transparent lie must be bad for reasons that go far beyond its impact on the budget?
UPDATE: Politico reports on the Obama “magic” to which the president of the American Hospital Association was subject earlier this week.
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