Well, yeah...

President Obama has announced that without a health care bill, the U.S. will go "bankrupt" because of high medical costs. There's no doubt he's right about that - Medicare is a massive fiscal sinkhole that's only going to get deeper and wider as a greater share of the population ages into retirement. The problem is, he hasn't made a convincing argument that the bill that's on the table - or any bill that contains enough goodies to placate a sufficient majority of the various relevant special interests to stand a chance of passage - won't also cause us to go bankrupt. I am deeply pessimisstic about the possibility of some kind of sane reform - it's looking increasingly likely the problem won't be fixed until the service output end of the system stops working, and thanks to the miracle of irresponsible government borrowing that could be quite a bit farther off than the failure of the revenue intake end of the system is likely to be. We're not about to stop digging until this particular hole gets quite a bit deeper, I'm afraid.