Obama's healthcare plan no cure for faltering US
- Source: Global Times
- [21:55 January 26 2010]
- Comments
By Stirling Newberry
Illustration: Liu Ru
Lightning has struck in the US with the defeat of Massachusetts Democratic Senate Candidate Martha Coakley by Republican Scott Brown. This special election was important because in the US Senate a minority of 41 can block legislation by using a tactic known as the filibuster.
In the US, a filibuster relies on the Senate rules that allows debate to go on forever, preventing a vote, but it also relies on a political reality: Obama and the Democratic leadership want it to take 60 votes, because if the majority in power wants to avoid the filibuster, it can.
The Republican Party has never had a filibuster proof majority in almost 150 years, and yet Republican presidents and Congresses have passed legislation. US President Barack Obama did not merely want to pass healthcare reform, he wanted to shape the nature of US healthcare system. But while a large majority wants a change to the system, they did not want his change.
His healthcare bill will save over 10 years less than what his war in Afghanistan and Pakistan will cost this year alone. The reason was that when it came to make a difficult choice between saving money and keeping the present system in place, he did not save the money.
A good healthcare bill in the US, once put into place, should save hundreds of billions in a year, not one hundred billion over a decade. Obama wanted to use the Senate filibuster to force concessions from the other chamber of the US's legislature, the House, and preserve the existing system.
The US, alone among developed countries, does not have a comprehensive universal healthcare system.
However, in most other developed and middle income nations, two realities push toward universal and comprehensive systems: A healthy people can work more, spend more, and take more risks, and healthcare has a large impact on imports and exports.
It is to the advantage of a country then to limit costs and improve quality and security. The US was the only country that could flout this, by borrowing in paper and consuming in real goods.
The US spends about 5 percent of GDP more on healthcare, for less results, than any other nation. In normal years, the US borrows 5 percent more of GDP than it exports.
If the US were to fix its healthcare spending, and direct that to exporting, or reducing consumption, then the country would be roughly in balance with the rest of the world in imports and exports, and it would have universal coverage. But Obama's plan, even according to the numbers of his own budget chief, brilliant young economist Peter Orszag, would not have fixed these problems.
