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True Cost of Pelosi and Baucus Bills

Posted by Defend America on Thursday, November 05, 2009 2:26:40 PM

Prescriptions for disaster

The true costs of the health-care bills

By BENJAMIN E. SASSE & JEFFREY H. ANDERSON

Last Updated: 2:49 AM, November 5, 2009

Posted: 12:41 AM, November 5, 2009

Don't
 buy the claim that the Sen ate health-care bill is substantially more
 moderate than the House measure. While Speaker Nancy Pelosi's
 legislation is even more onerous than the package created by Sen. Max
 Baucus and now championed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the
 larger story is how similar the two Democratic bills are.
 
 First, we need to get past the misleading accounting games. Each bill
 is routinely "scored" for its 10-year costs from 2010-19. Yet this
 includes several years when the spending wouldn't yet have kicked in.
 According to the Congressional Budget Office, fully 99.9 percent of the
 Pelosi bill's costs would hit from 2013 onward. Similarly, 98.3 percent
 of Reid's spending would come after 2014. 
 If you start the tally when the bills' spending would actually start
 (in 2013 for the House bill and 2014 for the Senate bill), then the
 bills' real10-year costs become clear --
 and are remarkably similar. 
 The CBO reports that, in their truefirst
 10 years, the House bill would cost $1.8 trillion, and the Senate bill
 would cost $1.7 trillion. Pelosi would raise Americans' taxes by $1.1
 trillion over that period, while Reid would hike them by $1
 trillion. 
 And the House bill would siphon about $800 billion from Medicare to
 spend it elsewhere, while the Senate bill would suck out about $900
 billion. 
 So the financial bottom lines are almost the same.
 
 And if we discount the bills' claims to divert hundreds of billions of
 dollars from Medicare (which is already on the edge of insolvency), the
 CBO says the House bill would raise our national debt by about $650
 billion in its real first decade, while the Senate bill would up it by
 $740 billion. 
 So, the bills would either sock older Americans by taking huge sums of
 money from Medicare -- or hit future generations with huge tax hikes to
 cover the shortfall. 
 Whether it's our grandparents or our grandchildren, someone is going to
 pay. 
 To give an idea of how much $1.7 (or $1.8) trillion is, let's compare
 it to private insurance companies' profits. The 10 largest insurance
 companies in America (according to the Fortune 500) last year had
 combined profits of $8 billion. You could
 doublethat, and it still would be less
 than 1 per centof $1.7 trillion.
 
 The House and Senate bills are similar in another important way. Each
 seems to mandate that insurers cover all comers at any time, at only
 nominal added cost for waiting to sign up.
 
 This would provide a perverse incentive for young, healthy people to
 avoid carrying insurance -- knowing that they could just wait until
 they're sick or injured and buy it then. Without question, that would
 cause premiums to skyrocket for most Americans who now have
 insurance. 
 Recent studies by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Oliver Wyman and Wellpoint
 all support this conclusion. Top Democrats in Congress dispute those
 findings -- so they should agree to let the CBO do an independent study
 of the question, beforeany floor vote on
 the legislation. 
 Yes, the House and Senate bills differ in many ways, with the Senate
 approach being generally a bit less regulation- and bureaucracy-heavy.
 But it's really just a question of degree -- and either one is more
 than capable of sinking our already badly leaking federal
 budget. 
 Benjamin E. Sasse, a former US assistant secretary of health, advises
 private-equity cli ents and teaches at the University of Texas. Jeffrey
 H. Anderson, director of the Benjamin Rush Society, is a senior fellow
 at the Pacific Research Institute.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/prescriptions_for_disaster_lrgi3GBjbGlIZFrM8hHXJO#ixzz0W03AYZJE

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