Set the health-care bill aside

THE newest version of the health-care bill, with some 700 new pages, will have been out for less than a week when the Senate meets Thursday to vote on it.

Whether senators fully understand it we doubt. We understand it in outline only: It is big, it is expensive, and it comes at a time when employers and consumers are unsure of how heavy a load they can bear.

President Obama assures us the bill won't add one dime to the deficit. If we are skeptical, it is from experience. The bill is full of expensive promises.

The bill would put much of America's middle class on federal subsidy, offering subsidized insurance for families up to 400 percent of the poverty level. For a family of four, 400 percent of the poverty level is $88,000 a year.

At the lower end, the bill would add 15 million Americans to Medicaid, the medical welfare system paid partly by federal taxpayers and partly by state taxpayers.

The bill would increase the percentage of non-elderly Americans covered by insurance from 81 to 92 percent a decade from now. That's a gain, but it's not universal coverage, and it comes at the cost of roughly half a trillion dollars over that decade.

We note that the bill "pays" for much of the new benefits by promising to cut the growth rate of Medicare, though the Congressional Budget Office says in its Dec. 19 letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid that it is "unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved."

We are reminded of our own state's Legislature, which "funded" state employee medical benefits last spring by assuming health-care spending would rise 3 percent per year, which is less than half the rate it was rising at the time.

This page has long been a supporter of universal coverage, and of efforts at health-care reform.

That was supporting an idea. This is an actual bill, the product of the Capitol Hill sausage machine.

We don't like the cost of it, and especially not right now. It has been a difficult year, following a scary year. Next year will be a difficult year.

To us — and to the American people, if polls tell the true story — the top issue is the economy. We wish Congress would focus on that and, for the moment, set this expensive health-care package aside.