In 1993, Hillary and Bill Clinton promised us they had found a way to provide every person in America top-of-the-line (“Fortune-500”) healthcare without raising taxes or blowing a hole in the deficit, all while lowering the share of national income spent on healthcare (then at 13.4 percent of GDP) without rationing care.   Alas, they were wrong.  Their promises were inconsistent and impossible to fulfill.



HillaryCare was going to cost $1.2 billion dollars a day in 1994.  (Read details here. . .)  In today’s medical-care dollars, after taking medical-care inflation into account, that amounts to about $2.2 billion a day, or $788 billion a year.  If one takes the 16 percent increase in population since 1984 into account, the annual price tag rises to $915 billion; and if the 19 percent increase in medical-care consumption as a share of national income is added to the equation (rising from 13.4 percent to 16 percent since 1993), the annual cost of HillaryCare today would slightly exceed one trillion dollars a year in 2009.

Today, healthcare spending comprises about 16 percent of national income and is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to rise steadily to 31 percent of GDP by 2035.  As Hillary did before him, President Obama claims he can comprehensively reform the healthcare system to lower costs and stop healthcare spending from rising as projected.  He, as did Hillary, claims to be able to staunch the rapid rise of healthcare spending without resorting to healthcare rationing while simultaneously guaranteeing high-quality healthcare to every American without raising taxes on the middle class and without increasing the federal budget deficit.   (He has pledged to cut the federal budget deficit in half, down to $230 billion, by the end of his first term.)

President Obama’s rhetoric is very little different from Hillary’s 15 years ago.  Yet, he refuses to put a specific proposal on the table for the American people to review and evaluate, and he is trying to steamroller a proposal put together in the congressional backrooms through the Congress by Labor Day.  It’s the old “trust-me” routine.

So, the American public is left with a dilemma:  If ObamaCare is really HillaryCare in new packaging, which his rhetoric and promises lead people to believe, his low-ball cost estimate of a trillion dollars over the first ten years is off by a factor of ten.  It will actually cost a trillion dollars a year.  If, on the other hand he really intends to remain within a budget of $100 billion a year without raising taxes, without rationing healthcare and without increasing the deficit, he has, as Ricky used to tell Lucy, “a lot of e’splainin’ to do.” 

So Mr. President, which is it?  Will ObamaCare be as good as HillaryCare promised or can’t the president live up to the Clintons’ promise?  If not, he has an obligation to tell the American people specifically and in detail how much less they will receive under ObamaCare and how much more they will have to pay for it.