Health care won’t make debt worse

William Bruchert, Las Vegas

Saturday, Dec. 4, 2010 | 2:04 a.m.

Regarding Joseph Schillmoeller’s Nov. 27 letter, headlined “Obamacare will cause our national debt to skyrocket”:

Here are the facts. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation have stated that the new law “will produce a net reduction in federal deficits of

$143 billion over the 2010-2019 period.” What is hard to understand about that?

If private insurance is so great, why does the average American spend twice as much on health care as the average western European and yet have worse outcomes (as shown by life expectancy, infant mortality rates and preventable deaths)? We may have the best health care — but only when people can afford it!

Not only would the public option (also known as “Medicare Buy-In”) have reduced the deficit even more (and still allow for private insurance, if desired, hence why it was called an “option”), but also the single most deficit-reducing plan would have been single-payer insurance, also known as “Medicare For All.” (By the way, private insurance has the so-called “death panels,” not Medicare.)

The Democrats and President Barack Obama continued to be their own worst enemies by not standing their ground by demanding a public option or single-payer plan against the corporatists, who do not have middle-class Americans’ best interest at heart. Instead they gave us a very lukewarm bill.

However lukewarm it turned out to be, though, it does not add to the deficit.