Universal Health Care Now. Its time has come...

The steadily rising exorbitant costs of healthcare may be the biggest single fiscal problem facing the American people and the US government today.

Agreed that the stimulus bill, banking and auto bailouts were huge and the results are yet to be seen. We keep our fingers crossed, because if these stimulus packages fail, well, God save us and with us most of the world.

Those are all big expenses, to be sure, but they are one-time payouts limited in their long-term effect compared with the big federal health entitlement programs of Medicare and Medicaid which all Americans count on for their golden years of retirement.

This is one of the reasons it’s significant that Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), told the Senate on Thursday that proposed health care legislation does not rein in the government’s runaway costs for medical programs. Elmendorf continues by saying, “In the legislation reported, we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by any significant amount.”

On Friday, a key House committee passed its chamber’s version of health-reform legislation, but critics complained that it, too, would do little or nothing to slow US health payouts. Republicans and fiscally conservative Democrats appear to have seized on the cost issue, either to slow the movement of the health bill or curb its scale and price.

Slowing the rate of growth for healthcare spending is one of President Obama’s goals for healthcare. The other is expanding health coverage to millions who now lack it.
Healthcare costs are not exactly a new problem for Uncle Sam, of course. Spending on Medicare and Medicaid has been growing faster than the economy for decades. Medicare and Medicaid are the monsters in that list. Absent changes in federal law, their cost will grow from 5 percent of US GDP today to almost 10 percent by 2035.
By 2080, the two programs would be about the same size, relative to GDP, as the entire US budget is today.

Unless things change, that will continue in the future. Measured relative to the nation’s gross domestic product, almost all the projected growth in the federal deficit will be caused by rising interest payments on the national debt and increased Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security costs, according to CBO’s just-updated long-term budget outlook.

“Comprehensive health care reform means finding ways to deliver health care more efficiently, and that will help us restrain the rate of growth of government spending over the long run. We can’t start that soon enough,”

We the people of this great nation should demand strict manage to oversee the exorbitant and rising costs of our health care, through tough and honest government regulations and line item controls of costs and spending. Those who are now pocketing our health care dollars are also predicting a gloom and doom scare tactic scenario, but we are the wealthiest and grandest nation in the world and we outspend the world in health care dollars, yet we are the only industrialized country that does not offer a comprehensive health care plan for all of our citizens.

This is a shame and it is wrong!