The House Budget Committee held a hearing yesterday on “Perspectives on Long-Term Deficits.” I was invited to testify. Here is how I concluded my written testimony:
The nation’s long-term budget outlook is bleak in large part because our healthcare entitlement commitments far exceed the revenues available to pay for them. By 2019, the House and Senate-passed health-care bills would add at least another $200 billion per year to those commitments, and unleash pressures for even more spending down the road. Meanwhile, the offsets used to pay this spending would be much less likely to occur, and the cost control provisions are not nearly robust enough to make a difference.
Congress would be well-advised to take a step back and rethink this entire approach. Instead of passing an expensive health-care bill that uses $1 trillion in offsets to pay for more spending, it would be better to craft a sensible, consensus long-term budget plan which has as one of its core elements an affordable, bipartisan health-care program, one that truly does the job on costs and expands coverage as well.
Here’s a video of the hearing (my testimony begins at 33:22):