Taking Your Eye Off the Ball

According to PresBO and members of Congress, health care is our number one crisis and needs to be reformed now.

Others will disagree.

Let's see how the numbers shake out.

According to the National Coalition on Health Care [ed: That link's dead; here's one with current numbers. HGS], the health care inflation rate for 2008 was 6.9%.

In the last 12 months the national debt has increased from $9.5 trillion to $11.6 trillion for an annual increase of 23%.

In that same time period, unemployment increased from 8.9 million out of work to 14.5 million without jobs for an annual increase of 63%.

If unemployment is reversed, that will address a lot of the short term problems for the uninsured.

I have no idea how to stop Congress from spending like a drunken sailor but certainly that is a bigger crisis than health care inflation.

This begs the question, where is the REAL crisis?