peter g. peterson foundation

peter g. peterson foundation
If President Barack Obama sincerely wants to expand health care access with a broad, bipartisan vote, here’s how he can do it:
Tackle entitlement spending first.
Once that goal is achieved — and doing so is a lot more realistic than is enacting universal health care — Obama will have more than enough political capital to make health care more accessible in the U.S.
But unless entitlement spending is first brought under control, then expanding health care access simply will add a new entitlement on top of the ones we already have.
We can’t afford Social Security and Medicare now, most Americans know. How will that situation improve by, say, expanding Medicare to cover the 40-some million Americans who currently are uninsured?
The answer is, the situation won’t be improved. Instead, adding entitlements will make our situation much worse and already has authorities talking of America losing, among other signs of a solid fiscal foundation, its AAA rating by Moody’s.
David Walker, the former comptroller general who’s now the CEO of the Peter Peterson Foundation, is the most credible when he raises the alarm.
“America’s health care system needs fixing, but the administration has got the steps out of sequence, in my view,” Peterson wrote recently.
“The president is advocating expanding health care coverage before we have proven our ability to control health care costs — and before we make a significant down payment on the federal government’s tens of trillions of dollars in current unfunded health care promises, notably from Medicare.”
Tackling the reforms in that sequence threatens to run up a staggering debt far larger and more dangerous than any before in American history, according to Peterson.
Instead, America must get its fiscal house in order, and then and only then, tackle health care reform.
To do so, we need a “fiscal future commission” to map entitlement and budget-control reforms.
“There’s only one argument on the other side, really,” wrote Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, in a column supporting the idea.
“You can find it on Page 10 of the Congressional Budget Office analysis of President Obama’s budget plans. There you see that Obama proposes to spend, year after year, 23 or 24 percent of the national economy, while proposing to levy in revenue, year after year, only 18 or 19 percent. The result: the national debt, which is equal to 41 percent of the national economy today, will rise to 82 percent by the end of the next decade.”
Entitlement reform is needed to avoid that fate.
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., has been a strong supporter of the commission idea in the Senate. The senator likely understands that “reforming entitlements first” is the key to a successful Obama presidency. He should make that case forcefully to the Obama administration — and the administration should listen.
In March, 78 percent of voters listed “getting the economy back on track” as their top priority. This suggests that a bipartisan crusade to reform entitlements would win broad support, because entitlement reform is the key to a federal budget that is respected, is sustainable and works