By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 7, 2009
In 1986, Ronald Reagan and Bill Bradley created a legislative miracle. They fashioned a tax reform that stripped loopholes, political favors, payoffs, patronage and other corruptions out of the tax system. With the resulting savings, they lowered tax rates across the board. Those reductions, combined with the elimination of the enormous inefficiencies and perverse incentives that go into tax sheltering, helped propel a 20-year economic boom.
In overhauling any segment of our economy, the 1986 tax reform should be the model. Yet today's ruling Democrats propose to fix our extremely high-quality (but inefficient and therefore expensive) health-care system with 1,000 pages of additional curlicued complexity -- employer mandates, individual mandates, insurance company mandates, allocation formulas, political payoffs and myriad other conjured regulations and interventions -- with the promise that this massive concoction will lower costs.
This is all quite mad. It creates a Rube Goldberg system that simply multiplies the current inefficiencies and arbitrariness, thus producing staggering deficits with less choice and lower-quality care. That's why the administration can't sell Obamacare.
GO HERE to read more.
What did Ronald Reagan have to say about Medicare at the time it was being proposed Mr. Krauthammer? "Obamacare"? If you stick a funny name to it should we be afraid?
ReplyDeleteI agree with this plan wholeheartedly. This is the basis where any reform should start, and it could be done in a dozen pages. Medicare and Medicaid need to be figured into the equation, and Insurance companies need to be nationwide; not state by state. The present over regulation costs billions.
ReplyDeleteInsurance companies need to be nationwide; not state by state.
ReplyDeleteHALELUYAH!!!
Did I spell that right?
I'm in too much of a hurry to care
Check this article out in the Baltimore Sun. It says that Congressmen are now going to have teleconferences with constituents in which questions can be screened and moderated. There is even a link to your site at the bottom of the article about a post on healthcare. Nice to see some MSM take you seriously.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bal-md.strategy08aug08,0,300080.story
Tax cuts? tax cuts are going to fix the health care system? Man, you guys are a one-trick pony. Let's not forget the record deficits Reagan and Bush I left us that Clinton had to clean up. Yeah, tax cuts for the wealthy, again. Great idea. Be sure to tell the guy with cancer, who was dropped by his insurance company, how tax cuts are going to pay for his chemo.
ReplyDeleteOh, and don't forget Medical Savings Accounts. Most Americans would be happy to scrape together enough money to have a savings account, yet alone a medical savings account.
ReplyDeleteRepublicans really need to wake up and join the rest of us living in the real world.
Bravo Krautheimer!
ReplyDeleteOf course....
Just tort reform and insurance portability would greatly reduce costs and offer peace of mind.
But Obama is so arrogant he could never accept a McCain suggestion.
I would rather be broke than to live in your world rich.
ReplyDeleteIs this not another case of almost half the country that pays no income tax, demanding that those that do, foot the bill for them? I have heard that misery loves company, but some of us object to being miserable.
ReplyDelete9 comments all day. wow. Nobody is reading this bill. Look at pages 16-19, 425- 435, 924-934.
ReplyDeletehttp://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h3200ih.pdf
There's more, folks, but this is enough to see it's an "Oh, Sh!?" document.
Read it, folks, read it every night as your bedtime story. DO NOT READ other people's "synopsis'" of this; read the real words for yourself. There are 1,018 pages of this BS to go through after you digest these pages. Try 925- 935 for the dollar costs (to start), this will not hold!