Posted by
Defend America on Sunday, December 20, 2009 7:27:21 AM
Obamacare Marches On [
Yuval Levin]
The
CBO assessment of
the bill tells the appalling story. We are going to raise taxes by half
a trillion dollars over the next ten years, increase spending by more
than a trillion dollars, cut Medicare by $470 billion but use that
money to fund a new entitlement rather than to fix Medicare itself,
bend the health care cost curve up rather than down, insert layers of
bureaucracy between doctors and patients, and compel and subsidize
universal participation in a failed system of
health insurance
rather than reform or improve it. Indeed, this bill will make it
exceedingly difficult to fix our health insurance financing system in
the future, since it sucks dry the potential means of such reform but
leaves the fundamental cost problem essentially untouched (and in some
respects worsened.) After all the back and forth, pulling and tugging,
it is hard to see what is left in this bill that any member of
Congress, liberal or conservative, would want to support.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjkxYmE1NjFhMmIzYWVkNmE4MDkyMDlhM2JjMjA4MDY=
Reid 2.0: It’s Still a Budget Buster [James C. Capretta]
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the amended Reid plan would reduce the federal budget deficit by $132 billion over the period 2010 to 2019, but that is a mirage.
For starters, as CBO notes, the bill presumes that Medicare fees for physician
services will get cut by more than 20 percent in 2011, and then stay at
the reduced level indefinitely. There is strong bipartisan opposition
to such cuts. Fixing that problem alone will cost more than $200
billion over a decade, pushing the Reid plan from the black and into a
deep red.
Then there are the numerous budget gimmicks and implausible spending
reductions. The plan’s taxes and spending cuts kick in right away,
while the entitlement expansion doesn’t start in earnest until 2014,
and even then the real spending doesn’t begin until 2015. According to
CBO, from 2010 to 2014, the bill would cut the federal budget deficit
by $124 billion. From that point on, it’s essentially deficit neutral —
but that’s only because of unrealistic assumptions about tax and
Medicare savings provisions. By 2019, the entitlement expansions to
cover more people with insurance will cost nearly $200 billion per
year, and grow every year thereafter at a rate of 8 percent. CBO says
that, on paper, the tax increases and Medicare cuts will more than keep
up, but, in reality, they won’t. The so-called tax on high cost
insurance plans applies to policies with premiums exceeding certain
thresholds (for instance, $23,000 for family
coverage). But those thresholds would be indexed at rates that are less
than health-care inflation — forever. And so, over time, more and more
plans, and their enrollees, would bump up against it until virtually
the entire U.S. population is enrolled in insurance that is considered
“high cost.”
http://healthcare.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWE0MTJmZDRjYTc5ZmZiZjNiODA2YjNmMzU3ODcxMTU=