America, we have a problem

James Capretta:

President Barack Obama says he wants to be the last president who has to deal with health care. But it is abundantly clear from his speech tonight that he has no plan to fix the problems in health care as they exist today, much less to settle the issue for good.

The primary problem in health care is rapid cost escalation. The president has promised for months now that he would have a plan to “bend the cost-curve.” Indeed, even tonight, he spoke of the plans being worked on in Congress as if they would address the problem of rising costs and improve our long-term budget outlook.

It’s as if the president and his team haven’t read anything that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has said about the health care bills under consideration. The truth is that these bills would add an additional runaway health care entitlement to the ones already on the federal books. CBO has said that the House bill would set in motion new spending that would grow at about 8 percent rate per year, while the revenue to pay for it would increase only about 5 percent per year. You don’t have to be a financial genius to sse [sic] a problem here.

Via Greg Manikiw.