Thomas Oliver: Numbers suspect in health care bill

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Senate Finance Committee must be participating in a prison rehabilitation program. It obviously has a former Enron accountant dummying up the Baucus health care bill, which has enough phony accounting procedures to get someone in the private sector sent to jail.

But you don’t have to be an accountant to be suspicious.

You just have to remember that this is Congress, creating an $830 billion entitlement and promising that it won’t add a cent to the deficit. Nor will it grow exponentially. Say, like Medicare did.

This is Congress saying that raising $500 billion in new health care taxes won’t increase the cost of your health care.

Nor will the $400 billion in spending cuts, primarily to Medicare, affect grandma’s coverage.

Nor will adding 11 million people to the states’ Medicaid roles bankrupt the states. Just ask California.

And then there are the uninsured. Remember them? They started all this.

Well, the Congressional Budget Office projects that 10 years after starting on Dr. Obama’s Elixir, there will still be 25 million uninsured.

You read that right.

A third will be illegal immigrants, who can’t participate in this program — wink, wink — but can still visit our ERs for treatment. The 16 million Americans left uninsured will be fined for being uninsured, which will raise $4 billion to help pay for the program.

You couldn’t make this up. Unless you were auditioning for a writer’s job on “Saturday Night Live.”

But this isn’t a comedy routine, though it’s hardly serious.

If this were a serious debate, there would be discussion about tort reform. But there is only silence.

If this were a serious debate, there would be discussion about how to move away from tax exemptions for employer-sponsored insurance. This distorts the marketplace terribly and sets up the third-party payer system that is at the heart of rising costs.

As long as you and I aren’t paying directly for medical care, it will always be overused, which raises the cost.

If they were in fact serious in Washington, they wouldn’t be having this debate at all.

They would be paying strict attention to this economy. To the stimulus they passed and whether it’s working as promised. To the housing sector, where the hemorrhaging continues. To payrolls that continue to get slashed. To the unusually bad hit small business has taken.

This could be the beginning of a recovery, if companies can start making enough money to hire new workers. Or, it could be a temporary lull before the recession resumes.

That’s exactly what happened during the 1930s.

A new study by Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute, “Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government,” available on Amazon, concludes that we are about to repeat history.

Then, as now, just as it looked as if we would recover, our government decided to pile on new programs, new taxes, and generally so bedeviled businesses that they didn’t hire, and the unemployment rate remained unimaginably high, and . . .

Thomas Oliver writes the Sunday business column. He can be reached at 
 toliver.writeright@gmail.com