A Detailed Analysis of the Obama Health Care Reform Budget

Speaking about the imperative to bring America’s entitlement spending under control last December, Barack Obama said, "What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further. We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else's.”

Right-on!

But in his first budget message, President Obama hasn’t made anywhere near the hard decisions that need to be made. In 2019, for example, when his proposals are all in, his budget would shave only about 3.5% off our Medicare and Medicaid bill, and half of his health care funding comes not from spending cuts but from new taxes—hardly examples of “seriousness” in making “hard decisions.”

Read the rest of this post on the Health Affairs Blog