Newsday
October 24, 2002
Bush Signs $355B Defense Bill
President George W. Bush signed into law yesterday the biggest military pending increase since Ronald Reagan’s administration – a $355.5-billion package giving the wartime Pentagon “every resource, every weapon and every tool they need.”
President George W. Bush (commenting on the scuttling of the Crusader artillery program):
“To have the willingness to say, ‘This program works and this one doesn’t,’ is important.”
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usbush242976429oct24,0,704917.story
Comment: 25% of our $1.55 trillion healthcare expenditures are consumed by
administrative functions, amounting to $387 billion, more than our entire United States military budget! Some would argue that both are a terrible waste of resources. But there is no dispute that the administrative waste in our healthcare system is particularly tragic considering the tremendous unmet healthcare needs in this nation.
The next time someone says that there would be no significant administrative savings by adopting a single, publicly-administered insurance program, remind them that our current healthcare administrative costs alone are more than our entire national defense budget! And the next time proponents of the status quo reject the single payer proposal as they tout our existing, egregiously-wasteful system of funding health care, remind them that President Bush said, “To have the willingness to say, ‘This program works and this one doesn’t,’ is important.”
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