"A billion dollars for your thoughts"

It used to be "A penny for your thoughts" but with inflation and all I figured I'd update the cliche. I chose a billion dollars since that's the kind of numbers our government throws around now; and a trillion is right around the corner!

You know the latest $900 billion dollar health care bill the Senate just passed? Estimates of the unfunded liabilities of this bill will exceed $9.2 trillion!!

Nonsense you say. Well this estimate is based on similar, under funded government programs that now have historical data. Lets start with Medicaid. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the first year of the program would cost $238 million. It actually topped $1 billion. The program now cost 37 times more (adjusted for inflation) then when it started. The current cost for Medicaid is $251 billion!!

Maybe that's an anomaly you say. OK, let's look at Medicare. In 1965 Congress estimated that this program would cost $12 billion in 1990. It's actual cost was $90 billion. And, over a 20 year period, the number of Medicare beneficiaries rose by 37% but the program cost rose by 372% . This is not a good track record.

No one in Congress is looking at cost cutting. That would require free market solutions. Instead, in a blatant attempt to get re-elected, they continue the policy of promising people everything -cost be damned. Unfortunately for them this time we're not buying it. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans don't want any of these health care bills to pass. I know that's not what the administration will tell you. They don't look at facts that are inconvenient to their story. I'm guessing that the best way to get re-elected is to do what you constituents want, not what the president wants.

But maybe that's why I'm not in politics. Common sense apparently has no place in Washington.

Financial data obtained from US News and World Report.