September 12, 2009 09:42 PM UTC

Where to Get the Funding for Healthcare Reform

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• by: madmike

All the naysayers and footdraggers in the healthcare reform debate bring up the cost and carp about how we are going to pay for it. Too bad they’re not so concerned about costs when it comes to other parts of the federal budget.

Buried in the bowels of section A of the Denver Post on Friday was a tiny article that stated that the Senate Appropriations Committee this week unanimously approved a $636 billion spending measure funding next year’s Pentagon budget.  And assuming that those numbers won’t be going down in the near future, one could safely project that that would amount to roughly $6.4 trillion over the next ten years or about seven times the projected cost of our healthcare reform plan for the same timeframe.

Now,  I’m not suggesting that our country should not be vigilant in the defense of its citizens. We should.  Nor am I suggesting that our country does not have an obligation to use its resources to defend freedom around the world.  As the greatest country in the world, we must lead by example.  But really, do we have to spend $6.4 trillion?  That’s more money than the defense budgets for the rest of the countries in the industrialized world combined.  No pun intended, I call that overkill.  And if we really want to get serious about getting our federal deficit under control, that should be the place to start.

I agree with President Obama when he states that healthcare reform must pay for itself and should not contribute to our nation’s deficit.  But why are our lawmakers not expressing their outrage over how much we spend on national defense instead of carping about how we are going to pay to overhaul healthcare?  Even if we took all the money needed for healthcare reform directly from our national defense budget, the U.S. would still spend $5.5 trillion over the next ten years to fund unnecessary weapons systems, wars in countries that aren’t worth fighting for, and bases in places whose citizens don’t want us there in the first place.  At some point don’t we have to ask ourselves, “Why are we doing this and who are we really fighting for?”