Morning Bell: “The American Public Is Not Behind This Bill”

Conn Carroll / March 02, 2010

After more than a year of $862 billion dollar deficit stimulus bills, national-debt-doubling federal budgets, and government takeovers of the auto industry, it is difficult to remember that President Barack Obama actually ran as a moderate in many ways. On his way to a 53% – 46% win over Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), then-Sen. Obama promised to “cut taxes for 95% of workers and their families,” expand the Army by 65,000 and the Marines by 27,000, and enact “a net spending cut” for the federal government. Obama promised lower taxes, a strong defense and shrinking the size of government. No wonder independents in nine states that went for President George Bush in 2000 and 2004 switched their vote to Obama in 2008 (CO, FL, IN, IA, NV, NM, NC, OH and VA). But now those independents are beginning to reassess. Public Policy Polling (a liberal polling firm) notes that Obama now has a negative approval rating in every state that he flipped from the Bush column to his in 2008.

And now President Obama has lost one of his biggest and earliest supporters on his signature issue: health care. Yesterday, when pressed on CNBC if he would be in favor of scrapping the Senate health care bill, Warren Buffett responded: “I would be.” Specifically, Buffett believes that the Senate bill will not contain health care costs: “We have a health system that, in terms of cost, is really out of control, and if you take this line and you project what has been happening into the future, we will get less and less competitive. So, we need something else. Unfortunately, we came up with a bill that really doesn’t attack the cost situation that much and we have to have a fundamental change.” Buffett is correct on both fronts: 1) the President’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has reported that the Senate health care bill would raise national health expenditures $234 billion by 2019; and 2) our current system is completely unable to control exploding health care costs. (more…)