Joe Lieberman Tries Out an Argument from December

by Tim Foley

categories: Enemies of Reform, Obama and Congress

Published August 24, 2009 @ 07:56PM PT

In our health care debate, what’s old is new again. We scarcely gave a thought to Canada or Great Britain’s health care system, yet we’re daily confronted with bogeyman that had long ago been vanquished. Socialized medicine, a rallying cry that still invokes memories of a country that hasn’t existed for almost two decades, is the new black. Even the wishful thinking expression that America has the best health care in the world – a claim that has been debunked again and again – is in vogue. The older it is, the more it’s in style.

So leave it to Joe Lieberman to come up with an argument that’s only 8 months old – and never gained much traction at all: that the economic recovery requires that we put off health care reform. His bon mot from the Sunday talk show: “I’m afraid we’ve got to think about putting a lot of that off until the economy is out of recession.”

You don’t need to be Ezra Klein to realize what’s wrong with this statement – but Ezra does it with such panache:

First, we probably are out of recession. Second, health-care reform is scheduled to begin in 2013, by which time we will almost certainly be out of recession, and if we're not, we have bigger problems. Lieberman might be uncommonly pessimistic about our prospects for growth, but that would imply support for health-care reform, as it will pump a trillion dollars into the economy and thus stimulate demand.

Third, the costs of reform largely manifest in the later years of the decade, namely 2015-2019, by which point we may or may not be in recession, but if we are, it will probably be a different recession than the one we're in now. There is, in other words, no connection between whether GDP growth is slightly negative in the third quarter of 2009 and whether we should spend money between 2013 and 2019 building a universal health-care system.

Lieberman seems to be stuck at the start of the year, when every other blog post I wrote talked about how in this economic crisis, that actually created more of a need to reform health care. Health care costs per person are still scheduled to shoot past $8,000 and health care will be 20% of our economy by 2018 at the current trajectory. Runaway health care costs are the single biggest driver of both costs in the federal budget as well as that for large and small businesses. When the economy was shedding jobs, it was also dumping people out of coverage – at the rate of 1.1 million jobs for every 1% rise in unemployment. It’s no accident that as the economy inches back towards recovery, the impetus to get health care done – which felt like a “Please hurry up already” in February and March but has now settled to a “Hey, what’s the rush” – fades.

So if the Senator from Connecticut, the insurance capital of the world, wants to bring up economic recovery, by all means, go ahead. Maybe people will remember what a drag on the economy our mounting health care costs truly are.

(Photo credit:  MichaelTRuhl on Flickr.)