More distortions:
A $5-TRILLION HEALTH-CARE PLAN?: The ever-astute Jonathan Cohn e-mails with a debate observation: Among Bush's outrageous distortions last night was his attempt to describe Kerry's health plan as a budget-buster.
Here's what Bush said:
[A] plan is not to lay out programs that you can't pay for. [Kerry] just said he wants everybody to be able to buy into the same plan that senators and congressmen get. That costs the government seven-thousand and seven-hundred dollars per family. If every family in America signed up like the senator suggested it would cost us five trillion dollars over ten years. It's an empty promise. It's called bait and switch.
When you listen to the line or read it quickly, you might get the impression that Kerry's plan could end up costing the government $5 trillion over ten years. Wow, that would be a lot! (Keep in mind that the entire federal budget for this year is just $2.4 trillion.)
But, of course, Bush is flat-out wrong.
The idea Bush attacks here is Kerry's proposal to offer Americans a new insurance option, by allowing them to buy into the same system that now covers federal employees and members of Congress. In this system, beneficiaries get to choose from a menu of private insurance plans, taking advantage of the relatively low group rates that federal employees get by virtue of their massive numbers. This would help all those people who can't get such affordable group rates now, because their employers don't offer coverage or because they're self-employed.
Notice the key phrase, though: "[B]uy into the same system"--as in, buy with your own money. People who enroll in Kerry's program will have to pay premiums just like everybody else. Whether they pay it all on their own or have their employers subsidize those premiums depends on their particular job arrangement. But, either way, it's not on the federal government's dime.
Indeed, the only significant expenditure for the federal government would be the assistance Kerry has promised those individuals who, because of their low incomes, cannot afford these premiums on their own. He would also offer small businesses some tax credits to afford coverage. To be sure, that costs real dollars, about $385 billion over ten years, or roughly a third of the plan's entire cost, according to a study by the Lewin Group. But that's hardly $5 trillion. And, relative to other forms of assistance, it certainly seems like an efficient way to guarantee stable, high-quality health coverage to people who don't have it now.
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