By Thomas W. Sinex
Sen. Evan Bayh, I have long admired your adherence to sound fiscal policies, often opposing others prominently placed in your party as well as that of the opposition.
I would hope that your habitually responsible and realistic attitude toward fiscal matters will guide your decisions regarding the health reform legislation (the “bill”) which Sen. Reid has crafted well away from the light of day.
You and I both know that the removal of that portion of the bill that deals with Medicare payments to doctors and other providers that otherwise would be the subject of annual reductions over the next 10 years to a separate bill, removing a total of some $210 billion — per the Congressional Budget Office — from the cost of the Bill, is an embarrassing sham.
This is a transparent scheme intended to support the claim that this money would not be committed, spent and added to the deficit. Whether the money comes out under one bill or two bills or a devious multitude of bills, the result is the same and the total amount expended will be added to the deficit.
You and I both know that the bill’s dishonest treatment of this same issue, pretending that the Medicare payments to providers would be cut 25 percent after the first year and thereafter, even though Congress has always revoked such a reduction on a year-by-year basis each time it has arisen, is likewise a sham foisted upon the public. It is a dishonest claim of a reduction in expenses that never would arise. An honest acknowledgment that such reductions would never occur would have altered dramatically the CBO estimate based solely upon the unrealistic provisions submitted to it by Sen. Reid.
You and I both know that advance estimates of the costs of government programs are almost always huge understatements of the actual costs. Except for the prescription drug plan, Part D of Medicare, where private enterprise competition has served to keep costs well below those originally estimated, the actual costs of government-administered entitlement programs have always exceeded the original estimates by astonishing multiples. When Medicaid was enacted in the mid-’60s, for example, its first-year cost was estimated to be $238 million. That first year, in fact, cost an entire $1 billion, with a capital “B,” and Medicaid’s annual cost is now a staggering $251 billion. In addition to this unsupportable expense, the annual expense of Medicare has increased by an astronomical 1352 percent since 1980.
You and I both know that the bill is designed to begin raising revenue in its first year, in this time of severe economic recession and stagnation, by immediately imposing significant additional taxes upon families, individuals and businesses. It is intentionally designed to not take effect otherwise, however, until its fifth year, in limited fashion, and then to ramp up its operations and its associated expenses gradually over the next three years.
As a result, the CBO has estimated the net expenses of the bill’s first 10 years, involving a full 10 years of additional tax revenue to the government, but only two years of full operations and the attendant expenses and only three years of limited operations and the attendant expenses. This is a shell game, a chicanery which any legislator should be embarrassed to accept at face value.
You and I both recall that earlier in this process the media invariably identified you as one of those moderate senators who would closely examine the fiscal and economic consequences of any health reform bill and proposed amendments and would likely vote against any bill that appeared to be fiscally untenable.
To my knowledge, your name is no longer mentioned among those moderate Democrats who might withhold their support for the bill now before the Senate. Have you been overlooked? Or do the media possess some inside knowledge unknown to your constituents? Do you really consider this Bill in its present form to be fiscally tenable?
I would appreciate knowing your present opinion, because to me and to many other Hoosiers this bill appears to be tantamount to an act of national fiscal suicide. You and I both hope to leave to our grandchildren and beyond a better country and a higher standard of living than we ourselves have enjoyed. To the extent that we sit back and allow these gargantuan social experiments to be launched under our watch, we are betraying our descendants and failing in our stewardship of the wonderful country and unprecedented standard of living bequeathed to us by those who have gone before.
By composing and sending this and similar letters, I am attempting to do my part to preserve our patrimony for our descendants. By your careful and realistic evaluation of the bill, I am hoping you will do no less.
— Thomas W. Sinex is a Sellersburg resident.
