House and Senate Democratic leaders are breaking records left, right and center with every new version of Obamacare they roll out. But if you thought they’d be competing to provide better methods for reforming the health care system, you were wrong. Instead, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) are duking it out for who can write the biggest and bloated bill that will actually bend the cost curve up. Senator Reid holds the record at a whopping 2,074 pages.
Unless you were planning on replacing your barbells with the Reid health care bill or using H.R.3962 to cure insomnia, these proposals will do little for your health. Experts have agreed that neither plan would do a thing to lower the rising costs of health care, one of the main forces behind the inaccessibility of the health care system as a whole. Instead, every page penned by Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid will create more federal regulations American families must comply with before they can obtain health coverage.
It’s time lawmakers realized that health care is too complex to micromanage from Washington. Instead, Congress should seek to increase the number of insured and lower costs through state-based, free-market reforms that won’t require massive new taxes, increasing federal power, government program expansion, or thousands of pages of legislation.
We are certain that by Saturday night, when the first big vote is taken, every one of those 100 Senators will have read, digested, and pondered every single word. Right?
Kathryn Nix currently is a member of the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit: http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm
It turns out that neither nuclear weapons nor terrorism may be the greatest threat to American prosperity and security. Instead, it may be something we hear very little about in the mainstream media: our burgeoning national debt. Runaway spending on entitlements, bailouts, and stimulus bills are driving the budget deficit upward. As an article in The Washington Times explains, massive government debt may be the force that ultimately overcomes the nation’s ability to be the “master of its own destiny.” Publicly-held debt now stands at $7 trillion, or about $22,000 per person. And it could double in the next ten years, leaving less and less for spending on defense.
In an interview with Politico, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) remarked that the defense budget is getting “sufficiently squeezed,” and he thought the solution may well be cutting back on big-ticket defense items or lengthening their development time. The article also cites a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments analyst who believes there’s no room for the defense budget to grow; in fact, he warns, the interest on the debt may exceed the annual defense budget—for the first time in U.S. history—by fiscal year 2018. The government should focus its spending on those areas which are vital to our national security and slow the pace at which it is increasing the national debt. Let’s hope someone hears and heeds this shot across the bow.
Phillip Reboli currently is a member of the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation. His views do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit: http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm