Billionaire investor Warren Buffett advised President Barack Obama on Monday to scrap the health care bill and start over.
In an interview with CNBC, Buffett said the current bill does not focus on controlling costs, which he sees as the central problem that must be addressed to reform the system. He added that while he does not like the Senate bill, he’d vote for it in preference to doing nothing.
“What we have now is untenable over time,” said Buffett, an early supporter of Obama’s candidacy. “That kind of a cost compared to the rest of the world is really like a tapeworm eating, you know, at our economic body.”
“We have a health system that, in terms of costs, is really out of control,” he added. “And if you take this line and you project what has been happening into the future, we will get less and less competitive. So we need something else.”
But while Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, applauded Obama for taking up the reform effort, he said that “unfortunately, we came up with a bill that really doesn't attack the cost situation that much.”
Asked if he would be in favor of scrapping the Senate health care bill, Buffett responded: “I would be.”
If the president were to start over, Buffett would advise him to “just show this chart of what's been happening and say this is the tapeworm that's eating at American competitiveness. And I would say that one way or another, we're going to attack costs, costs, costs, just like they talk about jobs, jobs, jobs.”
Buffett urged Obama to say that “we're going to cut off all the kinds of things like the 800,000 special people in Florida or the Cornhusker kickback, as they called it, or the Louisiana Purchase, and we're going to—we're going to get rid of the nonsense. We're just going to focus on costs and we're not going to dream up 2,000 pages of other things. And I would say, as president, `I'm going to come back to you with something that's going to do something about this, because we have to do it.’”
Like Democrats in Congress, Buffett would like to expand access to health insurance, but he said does not “believe in insuring more people till you attack the cost aspect of this.”
“If it was a choice today between plan A, which is what we've got, or plan B, what is in front of—the Senate bill, I would vote for the Senate bill,” Buffett said. “But I would much rather see a plan C that really attacks costs. And I think that's what the American public want to see. I mean, the American public is not behind this bill. And we need the American public behind the bill, because it's going to have to do some tough things.”
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