Last night, Barack Obama held a press conference about his health care initiative. He appeared articulate and in command of the issues when he was presenting his information. When you check his facts, on the other hand, you find that they were made up or completely false. The news media did its usual job of rolling over so Obama could rub its tummy. Just when a couple of them start to ask tough questions, you think they might ask one in the press conference. If they asked a mild question, Barack Obama danced around the issue without answering it for about 5 minutes. As a result, this press conference had to be one with the fewest questions asked since the invention of the radio.

I did not get to hear the press conference. I work nights and so was at work during the conference. I did get to hear Hugh Hewitt make a comment about the opening statement. Hugh said that the opening statement was completely false. On the way home from work, I did get to hear part of the Mark Levin show where he went over the press conference as it was happening. When I was listening the show was delayed by at least 3 hours. The little I heard told me that Obama sounded like he knew what he was talking about, but the facts I knew were completely different than the facts he was giving at the press conference.

The first point that stuck out to me was when Obama was talking about the deficit. I may get the numbers wrong as I was driving in the dark when I heard them. He mentioned that he inherited a deficit. That is a true statement. The projected deficit when he took office was around $200-250 billion. He projected Bush deficits over the next 10 years and came up with a figure of about $9.3 trillion. He then said that he had done wonders with the economy and that the deficit over those same ten years was only going to be $7 trillion. That was a savings of $2.3 trillion. As I remember, the deficit for the first six months of office is about $1 trillion +. The only way his figures can be correct is if he did not expect Bush to collect taxes and that all those taxes went to paying down his debts. Then, I might believe his numbers. Obama is going to rack up deficits in one year that will dwarf all the deficits of all the Presidents from Washington to George W. Bush, combined.

Obama also went on and on that his health care plan was going to save money. He must be the only person on the planet that believes that. The Congressional Budget Office, ran by Democrats, says that the plan will increase costs by $1.3 trillion. And, those costs will not keep down the regular costs of medicine. We all know how accurate the Congressional Budget Office estimates are. When they estimated the cost of Medicare, they said it would cost $9 billion by 1990. By 1990, Medicare costs were over $66 Billion. Other estimates have been even worse than that one. Using that as the baseline, would peg the actual costs of this health care bill at about $9.1 trillion. That sounds a lot more like what the actual costs will be. The $1 trillion figure just seemed way too low.

There is a way to almost instantly reduce the cost of health insurance and then the resulting cost of health care in this country. Right now, health insurance is a highly regulated business. Policies have to contain certain things in order to be sold in a particular state. That means I have to purchase maternity insurance even though my wife and I are both over 60 years of age. We should be able to drop that coverage and then reduce our insurance cost by that much. Other provisions in health insurance are also required by the states and federal government. If we eliminated those requirements, health insurance costs would drop dramatically.

The other related item that would greatly reduce the cost of health insurance is to make health insurance completely portable. Right now, my policy in Arizona covers me if I go to other states. If I move to Georgia, I have to buy a different policy based on Georgia’s requirements. I should be able to find a policy that I want at a price I want to pay and buy it. Say I live in New York where insurance costs are about the highest, I should be able to buy my policy from a company anywhere in the country. Then, I could pay the same low cost for insurance that they pay in Wisconsin.

If those are the only things done to reduce costs, it would greatly reduce the cost to the consumer. There are a lot of other ideas that would get more people insured and reduce the cost of medical practices. Those will have to be the topic for another post. I have lots of ideas on the topic. Strangely, none of them involve the government, except to remove it from the scene.