No Easy Fix For Healthcare System
The Obama administration faces numerous obstacles in their effort at healthcare reform. Despite efforts to seek bipartisan support, Republicans have been firmly against any sort of public healthcare plan and there a quite a few of the more conservative Democrats that have their objections as well.
It’s obvious the current system is completely broken, we have Medicare which will go bankrupt in a little more than 8 years as well as 50 million Americans which are uninsured which cause a massive drain on state budgets across the country. Unfortunately there is no easy or cheap fix, as things stand now, it’s looking like the administrations current proposal will likely cost over a trillion dollars in the first decade alone.
Thus far Massachusetts has been the only state to attempt mandating universal healthcare insurance, but they are quickly finding out that the costs have far exceeded their expectations and have been forced to ask for federal support to fund their program. With federal budget deficits expected to exceed $3 trillion over the next two years, the federal government would be hard pressed to find ways to fund such a program on a national level.
However, it is equally obvious some sort of change needs to take place, the unfunded liabilities of the Medicare program are staggering and despite previous attempts to control costs, they continue to spiral out of control. It is at a point where annual federal healthcare costs now exceeds the entire military budget spending.
American business are struggling to pay for the healthcare costs of their workers. One only need look to the auto industry to see how their healthcare costs put them into a distinct disadvantage with their competitors around the world.
As difficult it is to say, dealing with the growing number of uninsured has to be considered a secondary objective and it could quite possibly be fiscally unfeasible. Something first needs to be done to control healthcare costs and any type of reform that doesn’t focus on that will be doomed to failure.
