Reinhardt subtly notes the hypocrisy involved in today's demand for fiscal responsibility coming from politicians and others who never bothered to protest the lack of fiscal conservatism involved in the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act (MMA '03.)
Reinhardt asks:
"And how was this vast new entitlement for the elderly financed? Were taxes raised specifically to finance the bill? They were not. Was federal spending elsewhere cut specifically to finance the bill? It was not. Instead, the sizable annual federal outlays occasioned by the M.M.A. ’03 simply have been added to the federal deficit since the inception of the program, and will continue to be so treated in the decade ahead."
Reinhardt continues: "... a large fraction of the federal deficits in recent years have been and currently still are being financed by heavy external borrowing from China, Japan, Europe and the Middle East, leaving it to our children and our grandchildren to repay that American debt to these foreign creditors. Few Medicare beneficiaries at the time protested this intergenerational transfer."
Reinhardt concludes: "American citizens — especially older ones — might keep this backdrop in mind as they behold and comment on the current administration’s and Congress’s travails to place the proposed health reforms of ’09 on a fiscally more responsible footing than was the M.M.A. ’03."
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