Bringing Facts to Bear on Budget Discussion

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Federal deficits are too large, and mounting national debt threatens future generations. Both Democrats and Republicans embrace demagoguery and refuse to address facts and acknowledge lessons of history.

Since 2007, federal spending is up $1 trillion dollars and deficits jumped from $161 billion to $1.2 trillion over five years.

Higher taxes on the wealthy and Obamacare levies will pull down the gap in 2014, but then it will rise again. Health care, social security and slow growth, not low taxes, are the culprits.

Tax rates and rules imposed in January will increase revenue's share of GDP well above its average for the last 40 years.

However, Americans spend 18% of GDP on health care, while the Germans and Dutch, with more government cost-sharing and better care, spend about 12%.

Even with Obamacare, private insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses are rocketing, while Medicare and Medicaid have suppressed provider reimbursements to levels where many physicians refuse to take publicly financed patients.

Benchmarked against Germany and Holland, U.S. private health care prices are too high, while government rates for the poor and elderly are too low to cover providers' costs.

Republicans would rely more on markets and competition -- scrapping most Obamacare mandates and giving elderly vouchers to buy private care -- and hoisting the poor onto the states by replacing Medicaid with block grants.

Those would not bring down private health care prices -- cash grants to the elderly and fragmenting Medicaid administration would raise those.

GOP strategies would leave many elderly and poor forgoing care, less healthy and dying too young -- much the new reality for the former middle class and poor in Portugal, Spain and Greece.

The Germans do what Obama, Boehner and others are unwilling to conceive: directly reimbursing most health care costs, regulating most providers' prices, slashing administrative burdens and executive salaries, and eliminating most malpractice suits.

The necessary taxes would be less expensive for U.S. businesses and individuals than the taxes, health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs they now bear.

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