Mar

5

Warren Buffett on health care

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He’s the second-richest man in the country and, according to data from OpenSecrets.org, he gave more than $15-thousand dollars to Democrats running for federal office in 2008 and zero to Republicans.  Yet in a recent interview on CNBC, Warren Buffett called for the scrapping of the health care bill in the Senate:

I would be–if I were President Obama, I would just show this chart of what’s been happening and say this is the tapeworm that’s eating at American competitiveness. And I would say that one way or another, we’re going to attack costs, costs, costs, just like they talk about jobs, jobs, jobs in the…(unintelligible). It’s cost, cost, cost on this side. That’s a tough job. I mean, we’re spending maybe $2.3 trillion on health care in the United States, and every one of those dollars is going to somebody and they’re going to yell if that dollar becomes 90 cents or 80 cents. So it take–but I would–I would try to get a unified effort, say this is a national emergency to do something about this. We need the Republicans, we need the Democrats.  We’re going to 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–we’re going to get rid of the nonsense. We’re just going to focus on costs and we’re not going to dream up 2,000 pages of other things. And I would say, as president, `I’m going to come back to you with something that’s going to do something about this, because we have to do it.’

And that’s an interesting statement because it’s basically what Sen. Coburn has been saying.  Let’s scrap the Senate Bill and take the individual components that have bipartisan support and pass those.  Buffett said later in the interview that the public has to be behind whatever reform comes out of Congress and they’re not behind this bill.  A CNN survey finds that people are opposed to the specific bill in the Senate by a 3-1 margin, yet most people agree that some reforms are needed.  If Congress and the President don’t listen to Buffett or Coburn, perhaps they’ll listen to the people.

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