Plenty of people tuned in to yesterday's White House infomercial on health care, but were Americans buying what the President was selling? ABC sure hopes so, since it turned over a full day of programming to the administration in an amazing co-opt of one of the country's biggest media outlets. In last night's primetime town hall, one of the audience members asked the President how he can justify a plan that limits the treatments for people with terminal disease."My mother... has terminal cancer," Robert Wasson said, " [and] she deserves to be treated to the best of [doctors'] abilities. To say it's expensive is not right. I just don't think you can put a price tag on quality time with loved ones, especially at the end of their lives."
The President tried to tackle the end-of-life issue with his plan, particularly the criticism that under the government option, people would be denied certain treatments or procedures. "...[W]e're not going to solve every difficult problem in terms of end-of-life [questions]... But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that's not making anybody's mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or drugs... that is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery but taking the painkiller."
If anyone's going to need painkillers, it's the taxpayers who would be forced to finance this treatment-lite plan. In an interview yesterday with Joe Scarborough, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) estimated that the House's radical version of "reform," a bill that includes a funding mandate for abortionists, could cost upwards of $3 trillion. Unfortunately, that number doesn't mean much to most Americans.
After the stimulus, omnibus, and bailouts, the country seems almost immune to the administration's black hole of spending. Let me put it in perspective. You would need to spend one dollar every second--going all the way back to 30,000 years before Christ--to reach a trillion dollars. Think about it. The federal government's first trillion dollar annual budget was just 19 years ago. Now we're talking about just one program that could cost three times that!
