by Blake Seitz

In the words of famous free-market economist Mil­ton Friedman, “there’s no such thing as a free meal.”

It’s time to apply this common-sense logic to health care reform.

The Obama admin­istration claims the final health care package will extend coverage to 32 mil­lion formally-uninsured Americans. They also claim the bill will reduce the fed­eral deficit by a significant amount. If we are to take their word for it, they have authored the ultimate health care panacea—a system that greatly expands coverage and remains cost-effective.

I take exception to this second claim.

At face value, it seems substantiated: in March, the Congressional Budget Of­fice (CBO) scored the bill as reducing the deficit by $143 billion over the next decade. A deeper inspection reveals this is not the case.

The problem with the CBO figure comes from the methodology of its creation: namely, the CBO must score the bill on the bill’s terms. This means that, as the bill is written, all man­ner of accounting trickery can be inserted into its text. The CBO must then score it as truth.

Perhaps the best ex­ample of this is the noto­rious ‘doc fix,’ a provision which would cancel sched­uled budget cuts—$208 billion of them—to the Medicare program. Rather than include the fix in the bill, which would add $208 billion to its final price tag, the bills’ authors passed it separately, so that health re­form would appear deficit-friendly.

Also included in the bill are multiple instances of ‘double-counting’ (where one sum of money is spent in two places), and an in­stance where ten years of revenue are used to pay for six years of expenditures.

These dodges, which have been described as everything from “cynical gimmick[s]” (Rep. Paul Ryan [R-WI]) to “the kind of thing Ber­nie Madoff would be proud of” (Rep. Kent Conrad [D-ND]), really add up in the end.

At the bequest of Re­publican lawmakers, the CBO scored the health bill a second time, account­ing for the inconsistencies within its text. They con­cluded that the bill will add at least $59 billion (the more likely number is $208 billion) to the deficit over its first decade, and a further $600 billion the de­cade after that.

Clearly, the authors of Obama’s reform have ‘cooked the books.’ It’s fu­ture generations of Ameri­cans who will get burned for it.

After all, this is money that must be paid for eventually—if not by us, then by our children in the form of oppressive tax hikes and austerity cuts to the federal budget. Spend­ing now means passing the check to future generations.

Overall, health re­form is not a bad thing. The system we had prior to

March 23 inflated premi­ums to the bursting point and raided the savings ac­counts of everyday Ameri­cans. All Change is not good Change, however.

The change we’re getting puts us on a path to the centrally-planned systems of Europe, which have stifled competition in the E.U. and led to its current budget woes. One example is France, which taxes 20 percent of its citizens’ income to pay for nationalized healthcare; its program still runs huge deficits every year. For the United States, a nation which (rightfully) balks at high levels of taxation, such models are not to be emulated, but avoided.

What change should we be asking for, then? We should ask for a change in expectations. Specifically, we must realize that the two ‘holy grails’ of health reform—ex­panding cov­erage and reducing prices—are incompatible ideas.

The Obama ad­ministration has chosen to tackle the first objective. This is an admirable goal, but perhaps not a wise one.

As America recov­ers from a recession, our expectations for reform should have been based on cost, not coverage. Crit­ics may say this is a cal­lous approach, considering the millions of Americans still uninsured, but it is a reality based on common sense: we cannot hope to extend coverage in a last­ing, meaningful way if we cannot afford it at its cur­rent levels.

It’s time to face the music, CHS. This genera­tion of health care reform is unsustainable. As high school students now and taxpayers later, we must demand financial respon­sibility from our govern­ment, or be stuck with the conse­quences.