Ingenious Way to Pay for National Health Care
I’ve been playing catch-up on the health care legislation since I’ve been completely consumed with work.
I happened to catch this article on the New York Times website and it quotes Senator Baucus of Montana:
The current draft of the bill scores below $900 billion over 10 years, covers 95 percent of all Americans by 2015 and is fully offset.
Fully offset to me usually means you’ve found money elsewhere (Medicare as an example) or that you’ve cut programs that are less important than health care to pay for this.
What Senator Baucus actually means is that it is fully offset by the money saved from Medicare and new taxes.
By fully offset, Mr. Baucus means that the legislation would not add to the national debt but rather the cost of the bill would be covered through a combination of savings, mostly by reduced spending on Medicare, and new taxes.
The politicians are worried about this health care legislation adding to our massive national debt and their ingenious plan to keep this from increasing our debt is to pay for it with new taxes.
Why stop there? We can cut our debt to zero by adding new taxes. Anything can be accomplished by simply creating new or increasing old taxes.
This is not a fiscal solution. If all new taxes are going towards paying for this health care legislation then none of these new taxes will be going towards paying down our national debt. Much like paying interest only on a mortgage.
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