President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress continue to insist that the push for health care reform is far from over. But the release of the president’s budget for fiscal year 2011 marks another turning point in the debate, as it means the climb toward passage of the bill has only gotten steeper.
Looming Deficit
The problem for those trying to pass a version of the current plans pending in Congress starts with the avalanche of debt the nation is staring at in coming years. From 1789 through 2008 the U.S. government borrowed a total of $5.8 trillion. In 2009 the federal budget deficit exceeded $1.4 trillion. The administration now expects the 2010 deficit to break that record, topping $1.6 trillion. And in 2011 it would only fall to about $1.3 trillion.
Thus, in just three years the debt will have jumped an astonishing $4.2 trillion.
And it will only get worse from there. In 2020 the administration expects total federal debt to reach $18.6 trillion—and that assumes all of the president’s budgetary policies are adopted in full, including a health care bill the administration says will reduce the ten-year budget deficit by $150 billion.
The average annual deficit in the president’s budget for the next decade is $853 billion, and it would be rising rapidly at decade’s end as the full force of the baby boom retirement starts showing up in the numbers for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
If the country has not gotten its fiscal house in order by then, it will be wrenching to do so at that time. Debt service payments alone will reach $912 billion in 2020, a full 20 percent of all federal revenue collections.
Calamitous Debt
It is now readily apparent that piling up debt at the rates implied by the president’s budget would all but invite an economic crisis. At some point, the flood of Treasury debt instruments worldwide would lead lenders to demand higher rates of return for their loans, or perhaps to runaway inflation—or more probably both. The result could be quite devastating to private-sector business investment, productivity, and job growth, making it all the more difficult to get out from under the debt spiral that would ensue.
It’s not that the president and his advisors don’t recognize the problem. The problem is that the president’s stated solution will never work.
What the administration would like to do is to have Congress pass the health care bill and then follow it up with a bipartisan deficit-cutting plan put together by a special commission assigned with assembling a medium and long-term solution to the nation’s budgetary woes.
The first problem with this sequencing is its unrealistic political calculus. The president and Democratic majority in Congress are exhorting Republicans to cooperate in what will surely be a highly unpopular deficit-cutting exercise, right after they have locked into place the most expensive new entitlement program in decades.
The other problem is the planned timing of the debt commission’s recommendations and congressional action. The president would like the commission to issue its plan after the November congressional elections and have a lame-duck Congress vote on it. There is virtually no chance either tactic will work.
Reconciliation as Last Option
Still, congressional Democrats press on in their search for ways to pass this legislation, including the idea of passing two bills, not one.
The Senate has already passed a health care bill, which is now awaiting action in the House chamber. House leaders are suggesting they might be able to pass the Senate bill and send it to the President for signature if Congress could simultaneously consider and pass a series of amendments to the Senate bill which would make it more palatable to House members. Moreover, these amendments would be taken up and passed in a reconciliation bill, which means they couldn’t be filibustered in the Senate.
It’s certainly a novel approach. The problem is that a Senate bill awaiting passage in the House is not a law. Reconciliation measures are supposed to address budgetary matters. How could amendments to something that is not yet in law change outlays or revenues in any rational way?
In normal years, the submission of the president’s budget kicks off a new legislative session. The Congressional Budget Office resets its baseline and looks one more year into the future. The congressional budget committees start with a clean slate and write a new budget resolution governing legislation over the coming year, making it even more difficult to turn back and try to pass a bill based on last year’s assumptions.
Time to Rethink
The President and congressional majority should take the opportunity a new budget and legislative year brings to rethink how they are proceeding. The nation faces daunting challenges, economically and budgetarily.
There are opportunities for building bipartisan consensus on sensible solutions, including in health care, where both parties could come together to expand coverage and slow the pace of rising costs.
But those opportunities will almost surely vanish if Democrats continue to insist on rewriting American health care their way, which is to say in a way that much of the country plainly does not support.
James Capretta ([email protected]) is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC. This column originally appeared on http://kaiserhealthnews.org. Reprinted with permission.
