http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/08/opinion/08thur1.html?th&emc=th
Lead Editorial Mr. Bush's Improbable Budget Published: February 8, 2007 President Bush claims that his new $2.9 trillion budget request is a tough-minded plan for balancing the books by 2012. In reality, it's a smokescreen for making Mr. Bush's tax cuts permanent - and either hollowing out the government in the process or digging the country deeper into debt. The budget is based on a series of improbable, if not dishonest, assumptions. To make it appear as if the tax cuts are affordable in the near term, it assumes that the Pentagon will not spend a single penny on Iraq or Afghanistan after 2009. It also assumes there will be no costs for fixing the alternative minimum tax after this year, even though Mr. Bush and virtually every politician in America is committed to such relief. The new budget would also slash key entitlement programs and punish many of the country's most vulnerable citizens. Sharp reductions are envisioned for Medicare, with cuts of $66 billion over five years, and Medicaid, down approximately $11 billion. Some of the Medicare proposals could serve as useful starting points for a debate on controlling costs through such steps as raising premiums for high-income beneficiaries. But the Medicaid cuts would be largely counterproductive. At a time when the number of uninsured children is rising, the cuts would force many states to reduce their Medicaid rolls. Mr. Bush's budget would also take an ax to most other domestic spending. One program that would be gone entirely in 2008 provides monthly bags of groceries, each worth less than $20, to 440,000 needy elderly people. The $99 million block grant to states to help pay for preventive health care would also be eliminated. Other cuts - in Head Start, veterans' health care, environmental protection, scientific research, low-income housing and heating assistance, to name a few - would start in 2008 and grow, totaling $114 billion over five years. Such cuts would be shortsighted and cruel. They would also be politically impossible to enact - further exposing Mr. Bush's budget as the sham it is. Even if they were achievable, the proposed spending reductions would be grossly unfair. Government programs that serve middle-class and low-income Americans would be slashed to offset the cost of extending tax cuts that favor the rich. In 2012 alone, the president's new budget would cut domestic discretionary spending by $34 billion, while tax cuts for households with incomes above $1 million would total $73 billion. In all, by 2012, 20 percent of the tax cuts would go to that richest sliver of Americans; one-third of the benefits would go to households with incomes over $400,000. Mr. Bush's new budget has a few worthwhile nuggets, like a proposed increase in Pell grants for low-income college students and a jump in the funds for AIDS treatment worldwide. In drafting a real budget, Congress can take those items from the president's version, and jettison the rest. *** Fix the system with Medicare for all By Marcia Angell | January 29, 2007 The Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/other/articles/2007/01/29/fix_the_system_with_medicare_for_all/ THE GREATEST source of insecurity for many Americans is the soaring cost of health care. Leaving jobs can mean losing health insurance, and even when insurance is offered, many workers turn it down because they can't afford their growing share of the premiums. Businesses are having trouble, too. Those that provide good health benefits see more of their revenues siphoned off by the health insurance industry, with a resulting loss of competitiveness (General Motors spends far more on health benefits than Toyota). Insurance is not the same thing as health care -- not by a long shot. Private insurers maximize profits mainly by limiting benefits or by not covering people with health problems. The United States is the only advanced country in the world with a health care system based on avoiding sick people. It's not surprising, then, that health care reform is at the top of the political agenda. Most current proposals de-couple health benefits from employment and encourage individuals to buy their own insurance. The fact that they were ever coupled is a historical accident; there is no logical reason for it. Yet, employment-based insurance has been the only practical option for people not old enough for Medicare or poor enough for Medicaid, since the individual insurance market is notoriously treacherous. In his State of the Union address, President Bush proposed tax deductions for individuals who venture into that market and buy insurance on their own. Family premiums above $15,000 and single premiums above $7,500 would be taxed. This is a gesture, not a plan. It is just one more example of the conceit, shared by many on the right, that nearly any problem can be solved by jiggering the tax code. In fact, many of the uninsured don't pay taxes at all, and many more would find their small tax relief greatly outweighed by the price of insurance. More serious proposals are coming from the states, with Massachusetts in the lead. These aim for universal coverage by requiring uninsured individuals to purchase health insurance, under pain of -- you guessed it -- tax penalties, with state subsidies for the poor and near poor. In Massachusetts, there will be a token contribution by employers who don't provide health benefits, but most of the cost will be borne by individuals. A new state agency, the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, is charged with seeing that insurers offer adequate benefit packages at reasonable premiums. Though well-intentioned, plans like these all have the same fatal flaw: They offer no workable mechanism to control costs, mainly because they leave the private insurance industry in place. Yet, soaring costs are the fundamental problem ; lack of coverage follows from that. Already the Massachusetts Connector is having difficulty holding premiums down to the levels forecast when the plan was enacted. Even if they are held down at the start, there is little to stop insurers from raising them afterward , shrinking benefits, or both. It will take a large and costly bureaucracy to ride herd on all the ways to game this system. Perhaps the biggest risk is that failure will give universal care a bad name, just as the failure of the Clinton plan did 13 years ago. (That plan, too, made the mistake of giving the private insurance industry a central role.) We need to change the system completely and get the insurance industry, as well as employers, out of it. Private insurance companies offer little of value, yet skim off 15 to 25 percent of the health care dollar for profits and overhead. It would make much more sense to extend Medicare to everyone. That could be done gradually by dropping the eligibility age a decade at a time, while phasing out the insurance companies. The loss of insurance jobs would probably be more than offset by job gains in other industries no longer saddled with health costs. Medicare is not perfect, but its problems are readily fixed. It is far more efficient than private insurance, with overhead of less than 4 percent, and since it is administered by a single public agency, controlling costs would be possible. Unlike private insurers, it cannot select whom to cover or deny care to those who need it most. It is time to stop tinkering at the margins. Medicare for all is the only reform that has a prayer of providing universal coverage while containing costs. Dr. Marcia Angell is a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. (c) Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company *** "The NY Times noted that the cost of the war would have paid for universal healthcare in the US, nursery education for all three and four-year-olds in the country, immunisation for children round the world against a host of diseases, and still leave about half of the money left over." http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0206-04.htm Published on Tuesday, February 6, 2007 by the Guardian / UK Bush Slashes Aid to Poor to Boost Iraq War Chest Bill for Iraq conflict will soon overtake Vietnam $78bn squeeze on medical care for elderly and poor by Ewen MacAskill President George Bush is proposing to slash medical care for the poor and elderly to meet the soaring cost of the Iraq war. Mr Bush's $2.9 trillion (£1.5 trillion) budget, sent to Congress yesterday, includes $100bn extra for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for this year, on top of $70bn already allocated by Congress and $141.7bn next year. He is planning an 11.3% increase for the Pentagon. Spending on the Iraq war is destined to top the total cost of the 13-year war in Vietnam. The huge rise in military spending is paid for by a squeeze on domestic programmes, including $66bn in cuts over five years to Medicare, the healthcare scheme for the elderly, and $12bn from the Medicaid healthcare scheme for the poor. Mr Bush said: "Today we submit a budget to the United States Congress that shows we can balance the budget in five years without raising taxes ... Our priority is to protect the American people. And our priority is to make sure our troops have what it takes to do their jobs." Although Democrats control Congress and have promised careful scrutiny of the budget over the next few months, Mr Bush has left in them in a bind, unwilling to withhold funds for US troops on the frontline. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, said the days when Mr Bush could expect a blank cheque for the wars were over but she also insisted the Democrats would not deny troops the money they needed. Democrats could block Mr Bush's proposed cuts to 141 domestic programmes. John Spratt, the Democratic chairman of the House budget committee, said: "I doubt that Democrats will support this budget and, frankly, I will be surprised if Republicans rally around it either." Kent Conrad, the Democratic chairman of the Senate budget committee, said: "The president's budget is filled with debt and deception, disconnected from reality, and continues to move America in the wrong direction. This administration has the worst fiscal record in history and this budget does nothing to change that." The Vietnam war cost about $614bn at today's prices. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Iraq war has so far cost $500bn. About 90% of the spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars goes to Iraq. In addition to the spending on Iraq and Afghanistan this year and next, Mr Bush is seeking $50bn for 2009. Mr Bush said the fact there was no projected figure for 2010 did not mean he expected US troops to be out of Iraq by then. He said he did not want to set a timetable "because we don't want to send mixed signals to an enemy or to a struggling democracy or to our troops". Included in the budget is $5.6bn for the extra 21,500 US troops that Mr Bush ordered to Iraq last month. Some Democrats have threatened to withhold this part of the budget but more than half of the troops are in place with the others on the way. A plan to build the Joint Strike Aircraft has been withheld. Its absence, at the request of the Pentagon, could have a knock-on effect for jobs in the UK. In the run-up to the invasion in 2003, the Pentagon's projected estimate of the total cost of the war was $50bn. A White House economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, was fired by President Bush when he suggested that the total cost would be $200bn. The New York Times noted that the cost of the war would have paid for universal healthcare in the US, nursery education for all three and four-year-olds in the country, immunisation for children round the world against a host of diseases, and still leave about half of the money left over. The Pentagon has long complained that it is overstretched. Mr Bush wants to raise its budget from $600.3bn to $624.6bn for 2008 - about 20% of the total budget. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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