Tuesday, November 03, 2009
By Penny Starr, Senior Staff Writer
CNSNews.com
(CNSNews.com) – Former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin said the House Democrats’ health care overhaul is neither durable nor desirable because it would raise insurance premiums, ration care, and fail to bring down the cost of health care in America.
Speaking Monday on a conference call with reporters, Holtz-Eakin said that House Democrats had failed to draft a bill that would deliver meaningful health care reform without breaking the budget. House Democrats unveiled their 1,990-page health care bill last Thursday. President Obama called it a “critical milestone.”
Holtz-Eakin, however, said: “We are going to generally raise the cost of existing insurance to those who already have it – and that’s a majority of Americans – and then put in place a fiscally rickety way to get insurance to those who do not have insurance.”
“As a result I think that these are reforms which are not durable in any deep sense and are not desirable from the point of view of policy,” he said.
He further said that many of the tax provisions in the bill were not sustainable revenue measures but budgetary “gimmicks” designed to manipulate the CBO’s 10-year scoring process…
…Holtz-Eakin said that the House proposal committed to two great sins of public policy: creating an unfunded entitlement and enacting unsustainable tax policies to try to pay for it – mistakes that would make the reforms a detriment to economic recovery and growth.
“The heart of this bill is to repeat two of the greatest policy errors this country has made: to create large, unfunded entitlement spending programs, and to have a tax law that is not politically viable over the long haul,” he said.
“The budgetary aspect is crucial given the outlook for our economy, which we’re on track to triple debt over the next 10 years and run deficits of a trillion dollars as far as 10 years from now,” said Holtz-Eakin.
The complete article is at CNSNews.com
