With the fervor of a true believer, former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker urged an audience Tuesday during a keynote address at HFMA’s ANI conference in Las Vegas to be the leaders the country’s lawmakers are not.
“The truth is, an area that we need some of the most dramatic changes are in your area: healthcare,” he said. “You need to seize the day. You need to be the change. You need to make the change happen. Because if you’re waiting on Washington, they will do something to you, they will not do something for you.”
Walker, who is the founder and CEO of the Comeback America Initiative, an organization promoting fiscal responsibility, supported his argument that the federal government is playing fast and loose with the future fiscal security of the country by portraying the dire fiscal situation in a dizzying array of charts and graphs and contending that the Affordable Care Act will only make the country’s fiscal situation worse.
[See also: Out-of-control healthcare spending threatens national fiscal health .]
“If (the Supreme Court justices) affirm the (ACA) nothing else will be done this year, but the bill will be repealed and replaced at some point. Why? Because we’ve promised too much and have not focused on cost control,” he said. “It is unaffordable. It is unsustainable.”
Referring to the leadership in Washington as “laggardship,” Walker emphasized that it is people like those seated in the ballroom of the Mandalay Bay convention center that have the power and the responsibility to refocus the government on fiscal responsibility.
“What we do next will depend in large part on what you do. You need to be part of the solution not part of the problem,” he said. “Don’t wait for Washington to try and solve this problem. Don’t wait for the committee to try to come up with a solution when they have little to no knowledge of how the real world works.”
Walker said people can make the changes the country needs by recapturing control by voting in this year’s (and future years’) elections for the candidates that exhibit extraordinary leadership and that adhere to the laws of prudent finance and pay attention to the lessons of history.