From the Kelly Letter research stream comes just one point today.
Washington Times columnist Tony Blankley said at time mark 18:30 on KCRW’s Left, Right & Center a week ago:
Here’s the fundamental problem for anybody who wants to go down the path that the president seems to be wanting to go down, and that is that the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] scored the various Democratic bills all indicating that even with their plan, even including the public thing, that the long-term process was going to increase costs, not bend the cost curve backward.
The problem is that we can’t afford to pay for everybody’s health care in this country, and the only way that we can subsidize it is by rationing the subsidy. But nobody wants to do that, understandably, and so you’re stuck. But you can’t have an honest discussion because the honest discussion is, of course if 80 percent of the cost of health care comes in the last couple of years and you want to cut health care costs by 30 percent, it’s going to be 30 percent of 80 percent that’s going to go, and so the old people are going to get rationed. That’s what happens in every system where there’s a rationality as opposed to a market place. But nobody wants to admit that, so everyone’s got to pretend that the untruth is truth.
There are $40 trillion in unfunded liabilities in Medicare. It’s going bust!
It’s unavoidable. We are going to keep going down this path until the system completely fails, and then we’ll scramble. And the scramble will be that we can’t afford to subsidize everybody’s health care. That’s the inevitable reality.
Coupled with U.S. debt already on its way to $20 trillion by 2020, it makes you wonder when the pinball machine will just tilt.