Medical Care and Free Lunches
The editorial in the Monday, November 2, 2009 Wall Street Journal claimed the House health care reform bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi may bring to a vote as early as tomorrow “may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.” The editorial’s sub-heading pretty much says it all:
“Epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting: The Pelosi health bill has it all.”
One of several new taxes and fees in the House would be a 5.4% ‘surcharge’ “on joint filers earning over $1 million, $500,000 for singles.” However, as the Wall Street Journal points out in the next paragraph:
“Even if Congress had confiscated 100% of the taxable income of people earning over $500,000 in the boom year of 2006, it would have only raised $1.3 trillion. When Democrats end up soaking the middle class, perhaps via the European-style value-added tax that Mrs. Pelosi has endorsed, they'll claim the deficits that they created made them do it.”
Read the entire editorial, and we think you will agree that Speaker Pelosi’s health care bill -- H.R. 3962 -- may indeed be the “worst bill ever.” The editorial ends by saying:
“Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi's handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated.”
Or, as Thomas Sowell says so eruditely yesterday in a National Review Online op-ed, in arguing there are “no free lunches in medical care:
“Economics and politics confront the same fundamental problem (in medical care): What everyone wants adds up to more than there is. Market economies deal with this problem by confronting individuals with the costs of producing what they want, and letting those individuals make their own trade-offs when presented with prices that convey those costs. That leads to self-rationing, in the light of each individual’s own circumstances and preferences.
“Politics deals with the same problem by making promises that cannot be kept, or which can be kept only by creating other problems that cannot be acknowledged when the promises are made.”