I want Obama to be honest and slow down. He has said before,
quite clearly, that he ultimately wants a Eurocanadia-style single-payer system, but now he's swearing up and down that he's never wanted anything of the sort and this bill has nothing to do with that, and we get inane propaganda videos from the White House like
this, telling us that we should just accept the prepackaged press conference statements regardless of anything else. And if we hear anyone disagree with it, now we're supposed to
report them. And for some reason, we absolutely have to get this passed right now or everything will explode, along with all the other dozen or so giant spending bills that we absolutely have to pass without reading.
A single-payer system may well have its merits, but we can't discuss them until Obama is honest about it and gives us time to slow down and think about it a bit. Furthermore, for all the benefits it may have, we simply can't afford it right now. Projections say that the national debt is already going to be around $20 trillion in ten years. This healthcare bill is supposed to only be another trillion and a half, but the government doesn't exactly have a stellar track record for staying on budget. For example, look at the Cash For Clunkers thing. They thought a billion dollars would be enough for four months, and instead it ran out after four days. They underestimated the cost of that one by about 2000%. Something does need to be done about healthcare, but not something that will make our debt skyrocket even more. Bush doubled it from $5 trillion to about $11 trillion, Obama's planning on doubling it again in a similar time frame, and that's the best case scenario. What happens if the government turns out to have drastically underestimated the cost again, like they did for Medicare?