I *thought* we weren’t spending enough…

Lovely.

House Health-Care Proposal Adds $600 Billion in Taxes

Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.

Ah, yes. The stock-standard response to how to deal with a bad economy: tax the hell out of people in order to fund massively inefficient government bloat programs (“bloagrams”?).Barack ‘I am not a socialist’ Obama sells healthcare reform in Green Bay

…As for Republican fears that he secretly plans to socialize medicine, Obama said, “Great Britain has a system of socialized medicine. I don’t know anybody in Washington who is proposing that. Certainly not me.” With the U.S. government now owning huge pieces of the private sector, such as GM and Chrysler and half of Wall Street, Obama likewise rebutted charges that he is some sort of megalomaniac who wants to run the healthcare system too.“I’ve got enough stuff to do,” he said. “I’ve got North Korea and Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t know where people get this idea that I want to run stuff. “

I wonder.

The US spends more per capita on health care than anyone else in the world, and by some measures (see Note) gets substantially less for it’s health-care dollar. And so what’s the Obamatarian response to this? It’s certainly not for the government to spend less per capita… but to spend even more.

Note: The US is, unlike many other industrialized nations, a very large, incredibly diverse country. There are substantial cultural differences from place to place… sometimes within just a few blocks. These cultural variations, which can include such fun and exciting concepts as “obesity,” “chain smoking,” “getting falling-down drunk,” “smoking crack,” “sexing up random strangers,” “robbing the 7-11 to prove you’re a man,” “gang warfare,” “drug dealing” and other life-shortening hobbies, should, but rarely are, entered into the list of reasons why the US life expectancy is shorter than other nations. Japan, for instance, probably has very little in the way of Bloods and Crips and MS-13 doing drive-bys on each other and random bystanders. The point being… a shorter life expectancy is not necessarily and indicator of a less effective health care system, but could instead be indicative of other issues.

I’ve noticed that since 9-11, when anti-Americanism became quite the fashion, that one of the common comments about Americans is that, compared to our more enlightened superiors in Europe, we are fat. I suspect that there is some substantial truth in this… were are a land of lardasses to be sure. But this is *not* due to the government failing to provide us all with liposuction… its due to our choices to eat fatty, sugary crap in staggering quantities. While this may not last through the Obamaconomy, we have been a land of plenty… cheap, tasty food and lots of it. Well, being a chubbo will limit your lifespan, and spending a few trillion dollars more to hire an army of parasitical bureaucrats is not going to fundamentally change this. All they can do is crash the economy. Remind me: were we a thinner, healthier, longer-lived people during the Great Depression?