Obama's Health Care Plans Contradict Obama's No Tax Pledge

You could have seen this coming a mile away as there was no way that President Obama could promise to overhaul health care in the United States without taxing everyone, above and beyond his claim that 95% of Americans would not see tax increases.

The great unknown of the health-care debate as it unfolds in the months ahead is whether the current political landscape will prove more hospitable to mandates, cost controls and tax increases -- all measures now on the table that helped doom the Clinton plan,” Shailagh Murray writes for The Washington Post. “Passage of a health-care bill of the scope Congress is contemplating would be an extraordinary feat, but it is fraught with political peril, win or lose. . . . Republicans are betting that the specter of ‘big government’ can still unsettle voters.”

With each new detail, a new ad campaign is born. (And just wait until the funding mechanisms -- read: taxes -- fall into place.

“Democratic leaders in both houses said they would require individuals to carry insurance and employers to help pay for it. But they have yet to decide how to raise the necessary tax revenue,” Robert Pear writes in The New York Times. “Leaders in both chambers said they wanted to establish a new public health insurance program, which would compete with private insurers. But they have not settled on the details.”

He already broke that promise with the S-CHIP legislation, in enacting an increase in federal tobacco taxes, but the costs involved in the health care legislation are staggering, even by Obama's own standards (enacting trillion dollar deficit spending is insufficient).

Meanwhile, the Administration's claims that they would abide by pay as you go, is a futile grasp at claiming fiscal responsibility. The Administration engaged in fiscally irresponsible actions from the moment it took office by engaging in massive spending on pork projects that sap the private sector all while enriching those on the government dole. At the same time, the Administration's projections have been shown to be seriously flawed, which exacerbates the deficits going forward because if unemployment is higher than projected, revenues are decreased and the pressure on government programs, including unemployment is that much higher. It's a fiscal time bomb, and an objective reading of the economic figures would show that this Administration has failed miserably.

What makes the health care reform so misguided is that Americans already have access to health care - it's the cost that has Democrats playing games here. They can't and wont go after fixing Medicare and Medicaid - the existing government entitlement programs despite the dire funding problems with those two programs, but are seeking to massively expand government health care. Unless and until they show that they can fix the existing programs, efforts to expand government health care should be resisted.