From Friday’s Fox News All-Stars.
On the costs of the Reid bill:
Today we hear from an objective actuary from inside the administration that the Reid bill will increase the debt by a quarter trillion.
Secondly, we hear that the half a trillion dollars in cuts in Medicare are going to cause one in ten hospitals or nursing homes to become insolvent, which means they will either have to close or they’re going to shift all of those extra costs onto the other folks using their services, which means people with the private insurance will be increasing their premiums and their costs.
Now, we get every week another report — whether it’s from an actuary in the administration [or] from CBO — which is simply a report to prove the obvious from the beginning: There’s no free lunch. You cannot expand health-care coverage by 30 million uninsured and expect it will have the curve going down. It is going to increase costs. That is obvious.
Every report is just reinforcing that. You cannot have a cut of half a trillion in Medicare and pretend, as Senator Baucus is pretending, it’s going to make Medicare efficient and the services better. It is going to destroy Medicare because doctors and hospitals are not going to have the funds to treat them. … They’re going to have to see patients at such a rapid pace — at the rates so low — that there is not going to be real good medicine. It is going to undermine the quality of the medicine. It is going to undermine the whole system.
On the mounting federal debt:
The reason that there is this huge increase in the debt ceiling today is that it gets us past Election Day next year, so you won’t have to have another raise of the limit until after Election Day. … Better to take the political hit now [rather] than later.
But as an index of how serious the debt issue is, economist Irwin Stelzer points out that Moody’s has been issuing ratings since 1917. The United States has had a Triple A since 1917 — [through] world wars, depressions – unchanged, uninterrupted. In eleven months, Obama has driven Moody’s to the point where it has issued a warning that it might have to reduce it to Double A, which is what you get for banana republics or places like Greece.