Is President Obama really blaming our current multi-trillion dollar fiscal crisis on our current health care system? Yup. Here it is - another twilight zone moment.
C-SPAN's Steve Scully, interviewed President Obama today.
SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?
OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we've made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we've seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades. So we've got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it's putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off. So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don't reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can't get control of the deficit.
So, if I understand this correctly, the way to not "run out of money" (i.e. the way to reduce our multi-trillion dollar national debt) is for the federal government to spend more hundreds of billions on universal health care - Obama's current pet program. Yup. That'll fix the little red wagon of government runnin' out of money.
As Rahm Emanuel recently proclaimed, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." Obama is a great student. Use our current generation gagging deficits as an excuse to further shackle these future generations with even greater deficits spent on health care. NOW I understand.
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