Blood in the Water: A $35 Trillion Problem

The sharks are circling -- instead of circling the wagons, as I recommended yesterday, the administration appears to be floating the idea of dropping the "public option." Because political reality has shifted to the right, thanks partly to misinformation and partly to legitimate objections to health care reform, the President has shifted his stance just a little bit. This will do little to appease the conservatives and the people who are really scared out there, but it may just enrage the left. Health care reform that works may need a public option; maybe we will see this eventually and add a public option after the other reforms are put into place. I like what Tom Daschle said on Meet the Press this morning:

keep in mind that over the next 10 years our country’s going to spend $35 trillion on health care. That’s the projection today. That $35 trillion dwarfs the trillion dollars we’re talking about as up-front costs that we have to, have to, to construct in order to put this new infrastructure in place—including, for the first time, covering 50 million new American insured. So I don’t think there’s any question that we can find, within $35 trillion, the savings necessary to come up with part of that cost for the new infrastructure. And I think the president’s plan is, is, is, is about right. It’s, it’s the balance between revenue on one side and cutting costs on the other.

Despite all the hesitations in there (he was speaking in the heat of debate), he is putting the "price tag" of reform in its proper context. $35 trillion is an unimaginable amount of money -- actually, $1 million is more than people can really fathom -- but if you think about it, that's actually a fairly good estimate of how much money we as a nation will spend on health care in ten years. This fact also makes it difficult for people to understand how they personally will be affected by reform -- most people have no idea how much their employer pays for health care insurance, much less how much the federal government would spend under any health care plan. When they hear $1 trillion as a price tag, it scares them, and rightly so. The problem has gotten so big that the President has to accept some changes to his blueprint in order to get any reform through. Let's see if this change makes any difference in the debate.