I know that I repeat myself a lot. I am a fiscal conservative and social moderate. This puts me in the middle of the political spectrum from left to right. I support social welfare programs if they are legitimately helping the less fortunate among us. I am especially supportive of programs for African-Americans because of the racial bias they experience.
Unfortunately our national leaders have collectively lost a sense of fiscal responsibility in recent years. Looking at the standard debt chart (above) produced by the Congressional Budget Office, it is clear that indifference to debt commenced under President Reagan and has waxed and waned ever since. The debt has been growing especially fast ever since the Great Recession in 2008 and now stands at 77% of GDP, the highest since the end of WWII. Shrinking the debt (as a percentage of GDP) is now America’s most urgent problem.
As I have discussed before, it is the entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as interest payments on our increasing debt which will continue to worsen the debt problem in the coming years without strong corrective action.
All entitlement programs need to be reformed to impose cost control. Right now the two healthcare bills in Congress propose that the funding mechanism for Medicaid be changed so that it will be on a fixed (federal) budget from now on, rather than be continued in its current open-ended form.
Medicare is an even more expensive program than Medicaid. It would be better to fix both of these programs at the same time, but it is better to fix Medicaid alone than to do nothing at all.
It would be even better to replace our employer provided healthcare system with a uniform, but limited, health insurance tax credit for all (including for the self-employed) and to make all of these major changes at the same time. This would be the fairest way to proceed.
Conclusion. The current GOP plan to curtail healthcare costs could be much improved. It is only a small step in the right direction.
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