The Health Care "Crisis" Will Not Bankrupt Our Country

I'm opposed to taxing healthcare benefits. I'm also getting tired of the Washington mantra that the "health care crisis" will bankrupt our country.

This is just nonsense. It might bankrupt our generation, but it won't destroy the nation.

I know that the entitlement burden saddles us with about $17 trillion in unfunded future liabilities. However, once the baby boomers die, there is a baby-bust that will not require nearly the amount of government "babysitting" that the 77 million boomers have needed since they were born.

I also don't like "class" or generational warfare, but some boomers out there helped create three financial bubbles -- the LBO bubble of the late 1980s, the Internet bubble of the 1990s and the credit bubble of more recent vintage -- making money on both sides of the trade, bidding asset prices up and then getting fat fees and government assistance to restructure the very system they broke, over and over and over again!

Now, frankly, they are warning us that unless the rest of us foot the bill for their Viagra, CAT scans, PET scans and liposuction, our country will go to ruin.

This is a generational problem, and it is no more a threat to our children and grandchildren, whom politicians always invoke when they want their way, than is global warming. (My opinion.)

Future generations will be highly adaptable, just as we have been and as our ancestors were.

My parents lived through the Depression and World War II. They didn't saddle us with any debts, despite a government-debt-to-GDP ratio of 120 after World War II. They also enjoyed one of the most prosperous periods in modern history, from 1946 to 1971, in the wake of those catastrophes.

With respect to the health care crisis, which I believe is more of an "insurance crisis," there are numerous, lower-cost solutions to our health care problems, from electronic medical records to outcome-based measures of medical treatments (which should be widely publicized by doctors and by institutions. That will improve treatment and lower costs!), to utilizing existing government programs to insure children and college-age individuals.

President Clinton's S-CHIP program would cover anywhere from 5 million to 9 million kids, reducing the roles of the uninsured by between 12% and 20%.

No one even knows about the program, which President Obama recently expanded, because it is state-administered, and the states don't bother to inform the poor of the available and funded benefits.

Why is every problem we face being declared a national emergency? There is no proportionality in the presentation anymore.

While I agree that entitlement costs are a pressing need that we should deal with, it is we, not our children, who should, and will, bear the burden of reform.

Judging from Wall Street's rather nonchalant reaction to the "landmark" health care reform measure introduced by the House leadership yesterday, the Senate may offer a much less invasive procedure to cure what ails us.

Hence, there has been a noted lack of response in health care and pharmaceutical stocks.

I'm all for fixing the system, but I reject the notion that we are saddling our kids with a burden that is too big too bear. Despite the claims of economically illiterate members of Congress, countries don't go bankrupt. They suffer declining living standards, or lose their standing in the world.

But they don't go away. The British Empire is gone, but Great Britain has survived. There is no country that has gone bankrupt and closep up shop. Our problems will pass, and not without some financial pain to go along with whatever physical ailments ultimately afflict us.

As President Obama has said over and over again, we need a national dialogue to decide if we are "entitled to" every drug, procedure or benefit we want, regardless of cost.

Many of us out there expect cradle-to-grave benefits. The "Greatest Generation" did not. Nor do the generations that follow, if current surveys are correct.

Our kids and grandkids will have a whole set of other issues to deal with, and they won't be the same as ours. Just as I didn't fight World War II or face polio or the plague, our kids will have other worries that will supplant our own.

Just my opinion; I could be wrong.