HCR Is Not THAT Costly

Ezra Klein is making a point I’ve made before, but he’s doing it more intelligibly. Basically, he’s saying that in the context of a federal budget, and considering the top-line numbers for the HCR bills is over 10 years, we really aren’t talking about that much money at all.

Indeed, even if you ignore the off-sets used to pay for it, health care reform will cost somewhere around $85 billion per year, on average. In contrast, we spend more than that on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And at least they are planning to pay for HCR, whereas the wars are a factor in our huge deficit.

I am not a big fan of the specific bills being debated in Congress, but the argument that they cost too much or are fiscally irresponsible is pretty absurd when you put their costs in their proper context.