NEWT GINGRICH: Health The Biggest Affordability Challenge

Thanks to decades of bad policy – and four years of Bidenomics – America is facing an affordability crisis.

The news media tends to focus on the cost of groceries as the heart of the problem. But high grocery bills are a symptom, not the cause.

The greatest long-term cause of the affordability problem is the cost of health insurance. The Democrats say they want to lower health insurance costs – and they think extending supposedly temporary Covid-era subsidies will do the trick.

But the truth is, these subsidies will only help sustain the clearly unaffordable system (which Democrats created under Obamacare). The Covid subsidies are the latest evidence that they have no idea how to solve the underlying problems – and no plans to truly lower the cost of health care in America.

This problem is personal for Americans and critical to our national survival. Health care costs account for nearly 18 percent of the GDP – and they are rising. Ever increasing health costs make it virtually impossible to balance the federal budget. Without serious fixes it will get much worse. We will be doomed to spend even more money for worse health outcomes in America – and eventually go bankrupt.

Politicians and Washington think tanks are underestimating the devastating impact of the endlessly growing costs of health insurance and health care. Some may be intimidated by the intensity and scale of opposition to real change in the health system. Or they are overwhelmed by the complexity of the health system itself. It is about 10 times more complex than national security. So, Washington focuses on small marginal changes that seem manageable.

Instead, leaders should rethink how we take care of people, maximize healthy lives, and ensure that health care is really affordable (not simply subsidized). This should dominate much of our political discourse.

We got here because there are dysfunctional, out of control, and astonishingly self-serving patterns in our health care system – and they have existed for decades. Organizations and guilds intentionally suboptimize to maximize revenue for themselves – at the risk of bankrupting Americans and the government.