Monday, before a congressional panel, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner commented that “Healthcare costs are crippling the economy and that the U.S. is paying twice what other countries are paying.” He went on to declare that Americans are not being delivered “a quality kind of healthcare in this country,” and that we “need to reduce healthcare costs.”
Let’s get this straight: Healthcare costs are crippling the economy? I thought that the economy was already comatose due to the dastardly deeds of certain slipshod financiers, bankers, Washington politicians, and borrowers who should have known better.
Didn’t you?
For years, the word from D.C. was that it would take billions to provide the same level of quality healthcare to Americans across the board. Just couldn’t be done. Too expensive, they said. It was seen as anathema and, apparently, still is by President Obama who is using Geithner as his proxy to convince Congress that payments to health care providers need to be reduced.
Let me pinch myself again: The Secretary of the Treasury and the President both say it’s OK to dole out billions – soon to be trillions – to heal the self-inflicted wounds of the financial system’s largest participants now feeding at the trough of the U.S. Treasury.
But, according to Geithner and Obama, it’s a transgression – a grave one indeed – to provide excellence in healthcare without cutting payments to the highly talented medical professionals and institutions that provide those services.
One more thing: Why is Congress permitting Geithner to testify alone, without a countervailing, expert voice from the medical profession?
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