HEALTH WARNING

Washington is gearing up for a new run at heath care next year, which is another way of saying that it's an arms race to promise the most while disguising the costs, says the Wall Street Journal. Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag was the former head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and his useful work there on the unchecked growth of U.S. health spending, especially entitlements, ought to put the cost issue at the center of the 2009 debate.

According to CBO reports:

• In dollars, this amounts to $1.4 trillion -- nearly 30 percent of the entire federal budget.
• If costs grow on pace, U.S. medical spending will rise to 25 percent of GDP in 2025, from 17 percent today.

But those are nothing compared to the centerpiece of the universal health care agenda: a "public option" to provide government insurance for Americans of all ages and incomes.

• In one scenario, CBO finds that allowing the nonpoor to buy into Medicaid would cost $7.8 billion over the next decade.
• If that sounds like pocket change, keep in mind that Democrats want to make both the public option and private insurance less expensive for beneficiaries by transferring extra costs to the government, which would cost an estimated $752 billion.

CBO also finds that programs designed to trim costs, such as health information technology or comparative effectiveness research, will produce only modest savings.

[and where does the government get 'its' money?

Further socializing our health care is the worst thing we can do - we need institute personal medical saving accounts now which require a degree of people spending their own money on health, or the real problem of run-away cost increases will never be fixed (until the nation is bankrupted, that is)]

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