Fighting over Imaginary Budget Numbers — the Anticipated Battle over ObamaCare Repeal — How Silliness Characterizes American Political Debate

© 2011 Peter Free

 

07 January 2011

 

 

If we’re going to argue, why not argue about realities, rather than made-up nonsense?

 

Does anyone with more than half-a-wit think it is possible to accurately forecast the total costs of health care ten years down the road — regardless of which set of very complicated laws one is operating under?

 

This latest wrinkle began with the Republican Party’s re-ascension to majority status in the House of Representatives and the Party’s unrealistic call for repeal of the Administration’s health care reform of 2010.

 

Yesterday, some of the argument focused on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that repeal of “ObamaCare” might increase the national budget deficit by $230 billion over the next ten years — if that complex legislative program were actually implemented according to Congress’ 2010 plan.

 

As the CBO tried to point out, it is very difficult to project how something that has never been tried is going to work in all its interrelated and add-on components.

 

 

A decade is a long time to project the costs of an untested, significantly unimplemented law

 

In the real world, individual, situation-specific aspects of existing health care law often puzzle even specialized health/healthcare and business lawyers.

 

Until a complex infrastructure has been in place for some years, it is impossible to accurately forecast its ramifications or its overall cost.

 

If one seriously considers:

 

(a) how complexly health care affects individual Americans and businesses (in light of federal requirements and interventions)

 

and

 

(b) the complexity of the economy generally —

 

(c) one sees that

 

(ii) estimating costs

 

and

 

(iii) those costs’ future relationship to the national deficit

 

(d) is too difficult and too error-prone to be taken as anything but a wild-donkey guess.

 

As a result, the tiresomely unfocused health care debate is again side-tracked by a budget-impact estimate that even the CBO has to know is almost worthless.

 

 

Why dealing with nonsense is not good for us

 

Battles over nonsense divert us from dealing with real problems.

 

Until Americans come to grips with the minutiae that escalate health care costs beyond reason, our nation will continue to be sucked under by the tide of hidden greed(s) that underlie virtually all aspects of the health care delivery system.

 

As I argued yesterday, abstracted ideology and straw-people-arguments are doing us in.

 

In the ObamaCare case, politicians are now going to “hot air” the ideology of budget deficit reduction, using the CBO’s imaginary number — with not a real clue as to how health care worked either before, or after, its implementation.

 

This is reality-avoiding political idiocy.

 

Diverting isn’t it?  And that seems to be the whole point.

 

Arguing about nonsense allows us to ignore painful solutions to problems.