There Goes Georgie, Running Up The Credit Cards
But he does talk tough on being poor and old! From The New York Times' editorial page:
President George W. Bush's latest deficit-steeped budget, for all its tough talk of reining in spending, stands out as a monument to misplaced political capital. It would take some hard work, indeed, to get Congress to face up to the binge of deficit spending that is haunting the United States and future generations of taxpayers. Yet Bush is not going to face the music. Instead, he's investing his precious re-election clout in pushing a wildly expensive plan to divert some Social Security payments to private accounts, a step that would not even address the long-term financial problems with the current system. His proposed budget, meanwhile, is a picture of reduced revenue and swollen pockets of hidden spending. The lip service about draconian clampdowns will hardly solve the problem, particularly in the eyes of the international markets that are studying the administration for signs of commitment to closing the budget deficit.Bush is right to call for a healthy analysis of government programs to determine which ones cost more than they are worth. But the reductions he proposes for the biggest targets are timid ones.
...Overall, the budget is a sham that takes big cuts out of politically vulnerable programs that have very little to do with the explosion of the deficit in Bush's tenure.
Programs benefiting low-income citizens, like community development and health care, are destined to bear close to half of the cuts even though they accounted for less than 10 percent of the spending increases during the first Bush term. Some of the cruelest cuts would affect hundreds of thousands of working poor people who rely on child-care assistance and food stamps.
The deficit problem is a reflection of lowered revenue more than high spending - a fact that the president and the Republicans in Congress are determined to ignore. To the contrary, they propose to lock the once-"temporary" Bush tax cuts into stone. Meanwhile, expensive outlays will continue for the Pentagon, homeland security and mandated costs like Medicare. With such a lopsided perspective, vital environmental, education and housing programs cannot help but be disproportionately trimmed.
As a political tract, the budget neatly omits any accounting for next year's costs of the Iraq war, lately running at more than $5 billion a month. Nor do the budget figures for later years mention the hundreds of billions in borrowing that would be required to start up Bush's plan to allow Social Security taxes to be directed into private investments.
Washington hands expect many, if not most, of the president's proposed cuts to be reinstated by Congress. And given Bush's preoccupation with Social Security, it's hard to imagine him wasting much effort on a leaner Pentagon budget or saner agricultural subsidies. In the end, only the programs with the least political clout - generally aimed at helping the weakest groups in the country - will be pared down or eliminated. That might give some politicians a sense of political cover, but it would be a bad choice and would hardly solve the problem.
He wants to cut 45 BILLION from Medicaid. States will respond by tightening up program eligibility criteria to serve fewer people. The individuals who lose coverage will not be able to pay for their care, but they will still end up using services through the emergency room. Unless they can shift costs to the privately insured, more and more hospitals will decide to eliminate their exposure to the now-uninsured, former Medicaid recipients by closing their emergency rooms. With fewer emergency rooms available, ambulances will have to travel further to get help for people injured in car accidents, fights, etc. More people will die. Thank you, George.
Lena at February 9, 2005 5:15 PM
"The individuals who lose coverage will not be able to pay for their care, but they will still end up using services through the emergency room. "
In other words, we still pay -- just not through our Federal taxes?
Amy Alkon at February 9, 2005 6:17 PM
I could think of a few ways in which we all lose. First, uncompensated care is written off by hospitals as bad debt, so there's lost tax revenue. Second, hospitals will increase charges, if that's possible, for patients with private insurance to help make up for the loss on the uninsured ("cost shifting"). Insurance companies will then increase our monthly premiums to make up for the extra money they're being charged by the hospitals with the uninsured. It's all a fucking mess. Nobody wants to care for Medicaid recipients now anyway, since the reimbursement rate for a physician visit is a whopping $15 or so. If this proposed $45 billion dollar cut is passed, Medicaid will be completely ineffective for getting people into the system.
Lena-doodle-doo at February 10, 2005 5:54 AM
Thanks -- very helpful.
Amy Alkon at February 10, 2005 7:04 AM
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