...a fiscal disaster.

One of the more sticky accusations lobbed against a Taxpayers Bill of Rights is that healthcare will deteriorate if the government is forced to spend within its means.

Sadley, this third-rail mentality surrounding the funding of social services, in particular healthcare, strangles the lifeblood out of even the most modest of reforms.

With a Taxpayers Bill of Rights, government bureaucrats will be forced to prioritize how they spend money. While this is often misunderstood to mean poor children and their ailing grandparents will be thrown to the curb, that’s just not true.

What it means is that spendthrift bureaucrats and their cronies will have to cut out such programs as Viagra for villains. You heard right; $38 million a year in taxpayer funded Medicaid is spent on erectile dysfunction drugs.

We don’t know about you, but we think the little blue pill could be moved down a couple priority levels and little Joey could get his tonsils out instead. Just a thought.

Here are a couple more Health Issues Misstated surrounding TABOR

(via the Heartland Institute).

The claim: Colorado ranks 48th in prenatal care.

The facts: Colorado ranks as the 13th healthiest state in the country, according to a 2004 survey conducted by United Health Foundation. Prenatal care was one of 18 measures used to compile the total ranking--and it was the only measure on which Colorado was cited for needing improvement. In every other area of health measured by the rankings--obesity, smoking, crime, disease, poverty, etc.--Colorado ranked in the upper or middle tier of all states.

If you accept these rankings as adequate measures of a state's health, then Colorado is a healthy state. Furthermore, nothing indicates TABOR caused the low ranking on prenatal care, or that a low ranking means Colorado is failing to provide adequate prenatal care.

The claim: The share of low-income individuals enrolled in Medicaid is lower in Colorado than in all but five other states.

The facts: To the extent that the level of Medicaid enrollment and payment per enrollee connote high-quality health care (and there are serious questions about whether that is true), Colorado compares favorably to other states.

Colorado had the second-fastest increase in Medicaid recipients (45 percent) of any Rocky Mountain state between 1996 and 2001. Colorado's increase in Medicaid recipients was also well above the national average of 27 percent. Colorado's payment per Medicaid recipient was third among Rocky Mountain states in 1990 ($2,705) but rose to first among Rocky Mountain states in 2001 ($4,969).

Health Insurance Unaffected

The claim: The percentage of low-income Colorado children who lack health insurance rose from 15 percent in 1991-92 to 27 percent in 2002-03.

The facts: Studies by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Kaiser Commission have concluded the rise in the number of uninsured children has nothing to do with tax and spending restrictions in TABOR. CMS attributes the increase to the fact that employers are dropping their coverage. The Kaiser Commission says many children are uninsured simply because their parents are not aware they are eligible for Medicaid coverage.