Not to distract from the day of (ex) Osama (in which I’m wallowing as much as the next fella)…but just in case anyone wants just a touch of variety in their bloggy diet, here’s a peeve I picked up from this a.m.’s breakfast reading.
The piece is actually a good one by Jamer Surowiecki, describing how the long term budget issues facing the US are not those of deficit spending, per se, but of health care costs running consistently ahead of inflation GDP growth [per Acontra below]. It’s a fair account, accurate as far as I can tell on a quick read, and Surowiecki captures the nub of the matter precisely when he writes:
The ideal system, for most voters, would guarantee all seniors reasonable health care, stop the debt from getting out of control, and keep paying health-care providers as before. The problem is that you can only do two of those things at once.
Obama, as Surowiecki correctly notes, opts for door number three — choosing to change the payment structure for health care.
He gets it a bit wrong, IMHO, when he implies that Ryan similarly preserves his own two out of three options. In fact, the Republican blueprint neither guarantees all seniors reasonable care, nor does its voucher plan control costs, as Surowiecki does say, given that the private insurers the GOP wants to feed (how’s that for a mandate?) have already been shown to be crappier at cost control than Medicare. But if he is a little too kind to the feckless Ryan — a bit too fair and balanced, as it were — that’s not what gets my goat.