President Obama with Erskine Bowles, left, and Alan K. Simpson, co-chairmen of the commission on debt reform, before speaking in the Rose Garden on Tuesday.
Will there be real health reform?? Why is that man on the left smirking? What is the man on the right saying?? How serious is this? Well here are the facts, based upon Wikipedia regarding Alan K. Simpson;
"The June 7, 1994, edition of the now-defunct supermarket tabloid Weekly World News reported that 12 U.S. Senators were aliens from other planets, including Simpson. The Associated Press ran a follow-up piece which confirmed the tongue-in-cheek participation of Senate offices in the story. Then-Senator Simpson's spokesman Charles Pelkey, when asked about Simpson's galactic origins, told the AP: "We've got only one thing to say: Klaatu barada nikto."[5]
This was a reference to the 1951 science fiction classic film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien arrives by flying saucer in Washington, D.C. Simpson also utters this phrase in a brief cameo in Men in Black."
The International Monetary Fund is warning that the U.S. national debt will exceed 100% of GDP within the next five years, and economists both here and abroad are expressing alarm. The debt problem is mainly an entitlements problem and the entitlements problem is mainly a health care problem. How serious is it?
Here’s the bottom line: Our entitlement problems all stem from the fact that these programs are run like Bernie Madoff chain letters. Since payroll tax revenues are spent rather than invested, workers are accumulating benefits that are not paid for. Implicitly, we are creating huge obligations for generations not yet born — people who never agreed to be part of the scheme and who will surely be worse off if they participate.
President Obama has appointed a commission on the federal debt (National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform), mainly focused on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To signal his seriousness about this venture, the President has even gone so far as to put the newly passed health reform bill on the negotiating table — although the ink on the new law is barely dry.
Health Reform? 2000 pages of wet ink which is all a "MAYBE"