Maryland Conservatarian

In an otherwise uninformative column on the supposed commonsense beauty of yet another proposed government mandate to help the poor that Barney Frank(!) assures us will not cost us money, David Broder adds a little errata sheet:

“In my Oct. 14 column, I attributed to the Congressional Budget Office the estimate that the Wyden-Bennett health-care plan, if enacted, would save the country $336 billion over the next 10 years. The estimate actually came from the Lewin Group, a private consulting firm. The CBO has not scored the legislation.”

(The Wyden-Bennett plan aims to get the federal government involved by establishing a publicly subsidized individual health insurance program.)

Now that may seem like a whole lot of savings going on but it seems that just getting such insurance to all of California, as a universal health care proposal introduced in California aimed to do, “…would save California $343.6 billion in health care costs over the next 10 years…” (or nearly $8 billion more than getting it to all Americans)

That was also based on a Lewin Group study (which apparently has never found a government health care program that doesn’t save us gobs of money.)

So here’s what I’m hearing:

• We need to get rid of the Bush tax cuts so the government can finally afford to do such wonderful things as provide universal health care for Americans.

• Universal health care will save us lots of money.

• Such savings cost money so we may need to tax you more.