Re: “Why I voted for this health care bill” March 26 U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey guest commentary.
Around the age of eleven I became an accountant – nothing grand or too serious, just some number crunching and evaluating of costs. The big issues I ran into mostly surrounded my trips to the candy store.
If I wanted $5 worth of candy but I only had $3, how was I going to get that extra $2 to fill my craving? Let me tell you, this involved good budgeting and, of course, good management. Every time I had a major decision, I would evaluate it on its own merit – do I really want that ice cream cone if it means that I can’t have that extra scoop of jelly beans?
This was the approach I brought into the real world when I graduated from college a year and a half ago: weigh costs and make decisions based on reality, not fantasy. I know this has angered the expensive car dealers and the penthouse realtors (despite the encouragement from folks like Rep. Barney Frank, I recognize that the penthouse is a little too expensive for me right now). Honestly, I take this as a sign that I’m still doing a good job as an accountant.
Last Sunday night, while sitting in the gallery watching the painful proceedings of the House, I realized that 219 United States Representatives must have missed this little accounting job when they were younger.
One Representative, Betsy Markey (CO-4), is claiming this health care overhaul does wonders to “contain costs” in her piece entitled “Why I voted for this health care bill.” Rep. Markey tells us she fought hard for this “compromise health care bill” (a compromise that not a single Republican was able to support and that poll after poll showed the majority of Americans opposed) that as “(T)he non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates… costs $940 billion, more than $100 billion less than the House-passed bill (AND) it reduces the deficit by more than $1.3 trillion in the next two decades.”
Do you really think she believes this?
Markey boasts about number crunching for her small-business, but still argues that this “will be the single largest deficit-reduction bill in 27 years.” Is she serious?
She contends that “more than 30 million new people will benefit from health insurance coverage” and not only will it not add to the already record-breaking deficit, but it’s actually going to lead to savings? She boasts about making decisions “based on the facts” but is not able to understand that a budget – any budget – is not a record of hard facts but a projection of future financial plans.
What about the “fact” that the Congressional Budget Office can only deal with the numbers that Congress supplies? Economist Amity Shlaes writes, “The very rules that created the CBO make it hard for the group to fulfill its own mandate. You’d think, for example, that the CBO would use its own parameters when it crunches numbers.
Instead, the CBO must use the same mathematical assumptions supplied by the very lawmakers who wrote the bill the group is evaluating. No matter how improbable those formulas are.” In short, the numbers may well be consistent with each other, but they are totally out of touch with reality. Even former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, writing in the New York Times, described the group’s process as “fantasy in, fantasy out.” Have Democrats informed their constituents of this?
Rep. Markey wants us to believe that half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the (health care bill)), (AND) 118 new boards and commissions is a “good budgeting and good management” decision?
Don’t kid yourselves, everyone knows the bill increases the deficit. Every entitlement package in history has done that. As Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote last summer, the point of the proposal “was never to generate savings over the next decade.” It was to insure the uninsured. There’s a kind of masochistic consolation in the very improbability of the Democratic promise of savings.
Markey argues that small businesses are “helped” by the passage of this bill, but does she address how many are hurt? Employer-paid insurance is central to what David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute calls “the 12 cent problem.” He states, “for every dollar spent on health care in the United States, just 12 cents comes out of the individuals” pockets. Imagine what food costs might be if your employer paid 88% of your grocery bill or what a trip to Saks might be like if your company covered the vast majority of the costs of the shopping spree.”
Even if people choose to be responsible with other people’s money, this bill is loaded with disproportionate costs and mandates on small businesses all the while providing exemptions to big business and labor unions. The “facts” are simple: this bill will add a new $6.7 billion annual tax on small businesses” health insurance plans that will increase premium costs by more than $500 per family and single out the already-struggling construction industry by forcing a new health care mandate on even the smallest firms with as little as five employees and a $250,000 payroll. Call me naive, oh wise Democrats, but I fail to see how this is “helpful.”
This bill “was a better bill than the legislation the House passed last fall” so she had to vote for it, Markey claims. There’s an old saying that comes to mind when I hear this argument: “you can’t fall off the floor.”
I unequivocally agree with her when she says, “every decision you make in Congress should not be guided by a political compass.” However, if she weren’t too busy worrying about supporting legislation opposed by the majority of her constituents because her precious party leaders and the special interest groups they serve demanded it she wouldn’t be such a lousy representative.
Representative Markey, and the 218 fellow Democrats that passed this pathetic excuse for reform, have cast their vote and taken their side. Now, it is time for the voters to take theirs. The difference will be that we will actually look at fact, actually crunch numbers, and actually make a good budgeting and management decision.
Democrats, come November, the voters will make sure you have plenty of time to work on your pathetic accounting skills.
Maggie Seidel lives in Arlington, Va. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
