Health Care

I am no expert on the health care situation in the US. But there is one thing I surely believe. Government intervention, in the magnitudes suggested by Obama team, will only worsen the situation. Its not because I don't want the changes to happen. Thats how things are. Any analyst forecasting costs will ensure s/he can arrive at numbers that will allow the bill to be passed (esp. if the president wants the bill to go through). So, the benefits will be over estimated and simultaneously the losses will be under-estimated. Overall we have a rosy picture of future costs. At the end all this will fail and we have a larger deficit in the budget than expected. Of course, we can implement it and see the result the hard way or take a glance at the numbers from the past. (See some figures here)
Some excerpts

In 1965, Congressional budgeters said that it would cost $12 billion in 1990. Its actual cost that year was $90 billion. Whoops. The hospitalization program alone was supposed to cost $9 billion but wound up costing $67 billion. These aren't small forecasting errors. The rate of increase in Medicare spending has outpaced overall inflation in nearly every year (up 9.8% in 2009), so a program that began at $4 billion now costs $428 billion.

The Medicare program for renal disease was originally estimated in 1973 to cover 11,000 participants. Today it covers 395,000, at a cost of $22 billion. The 1988 Medicare home-care benefit was supposed to cost $4 billion by 1993, but the actual cost was $10 billion, because many more people participated than expected.