Wall Street celebrates, while budget analysts worry

Health-industry stocks are booming. Wall Street is celebrating its perception that major reform -- anything that might infringe on profits -- is now dead. 

Left unanswered: What are the uninsured to do? What are hospitals and clinics that treat them to do?

  What about families and employers who have increasingly-unaffordable coverage?   

What about small businesses that want to cover their workers but can't? What about employees trapped in jobs they hate, unable to start their own businesses?

Neither of the bills now stalled in Congress is ideal; if health-care lobbies had less clout, if officials had more backbone, they'd look a lot different. But those bills can be fixed, not set aside for another decade.

The Congressional Budget Office says Medicare and Medicaid spending will rise an average of 7% a year, with Medicare spending reaching $1 trillion a year by the end of the decade.
That reflects not only growing numbers of eligibles but also a failure to set priorities and cut waste.

It's not likely that Americans will get to the point of letting people die without emergency care -- at least not in public, not where the TV cameras can capture it. In other words, if the health-care system as a whole doesn't get fixed, the public programs will continue to grow at the expense of the private sector.

So, in the end, most everyone will be on a public plan.

That's probably not what the opponents of health reform intended.

--Send in your responses to be printed as Letters to the Editor to Carol Gentry at this e-mail.