WaPo - "Health reform that won't break the bank" by Peter Orzag

[TomCADem]

Here is Peter Orzag trying to appeal to fiscal conservatives. Except, there really isn't such a thing as a fiscal conservative. Most would happily bust the deficit to pass tax cuts to the rich.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/04/AR2010030404041.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Health-insurance reform offers many benefits, such as common-sense rules of the road and basic consumer protections to keep insurance companies honest and prevent them from denying coverage to anyone because of a preexisting medical condition. But some critics complain that the administration has slipped in its commitment to fiscal responsibility in health reform.

These critics are mistaken. The president's plan represents an important step toward long-term fiscal sustainability: It more than meets the president's commitments that health-insurance reform not add a dime to the deficit and that it contain measures to reduce the growth rate of health-care costs over time.

To take one recent example, some skeptics have claimed that the $100 billion in deficit reduction the president's plan would achieve over the next decade is mere gimmickry because the legislation would pay for only six years of coverage expansions with 10 years of budgetary offsets.

Now, it's certainly a time-honored Washington budget gimmick to pay for just a few years of costs with many years of savings. But if that were the course being taken, we would expect to see a large hole at the end of the first decade and ever-larger deficits in the second. Instead, the savings in the president's plan grow faster than the costs over time, generating greater deficit reduction with each passing year -- roughly $1 trillion, all told, in the second decade.

Some fiscal hawks like us have also contended that we should scrap comprehensive health reform altogether and focus on "cost first" -- devoting the savings now used mostly for coverage expansions to deficit reduction instead. Even leaving aside the moral imperative of extending coverage to millions of Americans, it seems implausible that Congress would take the crucial step of creating a dynamic infrastructure for containing costs in legislation dedicated solely to deficit reduction.