Warren Buffett to Fellow Democrats: Start Over on Health Care
In an interview on CNBC earlier today, longtime Obama supporter Warren Buffett expressed several messages that Democrats may want to take to heart before attempting to cram a massive health care bill down the throats of the American people:
Legislation should focus on costs before coverage: “If I were President Obama, I would just show this chart of what’s been happening and say this is the tape worm that’s eating at American competitiveness, and I would say that one way or another, we’re going to attack cost, cost, cost, just like they talk about jobs, jobs, jobs in the economy. It’s cost, cost, cost on this side….Universality — yeah, I believe in insuring more people, but I don’t believe in insuring more people until you attack the cost aspect of this.”
The Democrat bills fail to control costs: “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. We have to have something that will end the constant increase in medical cost as a percentage of GDP.”
The Democrat bills include “nonsense” backroom deals for special interests: “[Democrats should] cut off all the kinds of things like the 800,000 special people in Florida or the Cornhusker Kickback, as they called it, or the Louisiana Purchase and we’re going to get rid of the nonsense. We’re just going to focus on cost and we’re not going to dream up 2,000 pages of other things.”
Democrats should not try to jam through a massive bill on a party-line vote: “I would try to get a unified effort saying this is a national emergency to do something about this. We need the Republicans, we need the Democrats.”
If President Obama won’t listen to the American people calling for this legislation to be scrapped and to start over with a bipartisan effort focused on containing costs rather than a government takeover of health care, will he at least listen to one of his biggest supporters saying the same thing?