What happens if health reform fails

We can only tackle out-of-control costs as part of a deal that also provides Americans with the security of guaranteed health care. That observation in itself should make anyone concerned with fiscal responsibility support this reform.

Over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded, the proposed legislation would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. And by giving us a chance, finally, to rein in the ever-growing spending of Medicare, it would greatly improve our long-run fiscal prospects. But there? The Republican campaign against health care reform has rested in part on the traditional arguments, arguments that go back to the days when Ronald Reagan was trying to scare Americans into opposing Medicare?

But in the closing rounds of the health care fight, the GOP has focused on an effort to demonize cost-control efforts. The Senate bill would impose? John McCain, who proposed much deeper cuts just last year as part of his presidential campaign. If you? Tom Coburn. If these tactics work, and health reform fails, think of the message this would convey: It would signal that any effort to deal with the biggest budget problem we face will be successfully played by political opponents as an attack on older Americans.

It would be a long time before anyone was willing to take on the challenge again; remember that after the failure of the Clinton effort, it was 16 years before the next try.

If it fails, the demagogues will have won, and we probably won? To the centrists still on the fence over health reform: If you care about fiscal responsibility, you better be afraid of what will happen if reform fails.

This artwork by Nancy Ohanian relates to the slow pace at which health care reform is proceeding. It would be called a health insurance exchange and if you didn't have insurance from your employer, you would get subsidies from the government and you go to this exchange and you could choose what insurance plan you would have.

And each of the proposals would expand Medicaid. Where there's disagreement is over how all of this will be paid … and over the so-called "public option," a government-run health care plan that would be available alongside private plans. The public option is by no means a done deal, but tell that to the people doing all the yelling at town hall meetings last week.

Arlen Specter, a Democrat. Specter denied that's where the country was heading. They think the real plan of President Obama, or those who want health care reform, is to have single-payer, totally government-run health care reform," Neas said.

And now to address some of the health care reform's hottest hot-button issues, such as the reference to a "death panel" on Sarah Palin's Facebook page. Such a system is downright evil," the message read. And what about those television ads aimed at the elderly, claiming that seniors may lose their own doctors? This legislation is absolutely good for seniors. The United States spends twice as much as the average of all the industrialized nations in the world.

CNN -- Watching the angry outbursts at town hall meetings on health reform and the continuing public ambivalence about current efforts to reform our health system almost makes me wish that the reform effort fails. Perhaps Americans need to be taught a basic lesson on the economics of employment-based health insurance before they will feel as smugly secure with it as they do now and before they will stop nitpicking health-reform efforts to death over this or that detail.

And America's currently insured middle class will be increasingly desperate if health reform fails. Millions more such families will see their take-home pay shrink.

Millions will lose their employment-based insurance, especially in medium and small-sized firms. And millions will find themselves inexorably priced out of health care as we know it. Milliman Inc.

The index totals the family's out-of-pocket spending for health care plus the contribution employers and employees make to that family's job-related health insurance coverage. That is more than a doubling of costs in the span of a decade!

Since , the index has grown at an average annual compound rate of 8. Suppose we make it 8 percent for the coming decade. All company bargainers worth their salt keep their eye on the total labor unit cost, and when they pay an admittedly horrendous amount for health care, that's money that can't be spent for higher [cash] wages or higher pensions or other fringe benefits. So we directly, the union and its members, feel the costs of the health care system.