San Francisco-style budgeting
San Francisco is emblematic of California as a whole. We don’t want to vote no and tell organizations that they don’t get any more money.
This aspect of San Francisco-style budgeting, from The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. sounds awfully familiar to me:
Politicians approve [fiscally-ruinous labor contracts], despite needing to balance the budget every year, because the budget impact of proposed contracts is examined by the Board of Supervisors only for the following year, no matter how long contracts run. According to former city controller Ed Harrington, it has become common practice not to schedule any raises for the first year of a contract, but to provide extensive raises in later years.
The result is a contract that looks affordable one year out, then blows up in the city’s face.
That’s the model congress is using for the health care takeover:
It is true that the CBO officially scored the bill as costing $848 billion. But much of the spending is back-loaded. The bill doesn’t start spending until 2014, and only costs $9 billion that year. By 2019, the annual cost hits $196 billion. The minority staff of the Senate Budget Committee reports the cost is closer to $2.5 trillion over 10 years once all budget gimmicks are factored out. If you include costs shifted to individuals, businesses and state governments, the price tag could top $6 trillion.
Even the tiny deficit reduction it might generate requires that a future congress cut Medicare. That isn’t going to happen. If this congress isn’t willing to cut Medicare as part of the huge health care takeover, no future congress is going to be willing to cut Medicare as a standalone bill.
They’ve deliberately pushed the costs of the plan outside of the auditor’s legal window. So that the whole country can be as broke as the “worst-run big city” in its most fiscally-challenged state.
- Five Health Reform Whoppers: Michael D. Tanner
- Premiums will not go down; taxes will be raised; you aren’t guaranteed to be able to keep your current insurance, and it will cost a whole lot of money.
- The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.: Benjamin Wachs and Joe Eskenazi
- “Spend more. Get less. We’re the city that knows how… In 2007, the city went back to the voters, asking for another $50 million for libraries—without publicizing that this would fund the five unfinished projects voters had already paid for.”
More health care
- Health care reform: walking into quicksand
- The first step, when you walk into quicksand, is to walk back out. Health providers today are in the business of dealing with human resources departments and government agencies. Their customers are bureaucrats. Their best innovations will be in the fields of paperwork and red tape. If we want their innovations to be health care innovations, their customers need to be their patients.
- Robbing Peter to pay Peter… later
- Robbing from Peter to pay Paul? Government goes one better: robbing from Peter to pay Peter. As usual, Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on taxes, because Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on anything. “However legal it may be to pay what never has been lent, this style of business seems to me extremely inconvenient!”
- Keep plucking that Congress
- The more people who can afford their own health care and insurance, the easier it will be to care for the rest.
- Discouraging health insurance competition
- The largest problem with our current health care system is that competition is actively discouraged at every level. Rather than making that problem worse, we should be encouraging real competition among insurance providers and health care providers.
- Exchanging the market for high prices and corruption
- The Democratic health insurance exchange looks like it’s going to make many of the same mistakes politicians made in California when they tried to choke electrical power through a power exchange.
- 11 more pages with the topic health care, and other related pages