Tag Archives: CBO

News

Several stories on government spending, waste and corruption

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Here are some interesting stories sent to me by ECM.

CNN: Report finds imprudent spending at USPS.

Excerpt:

The U.S. Postal Service spent more than $792,000 “without justification” on meals and events in one five-month period even as it reported losing $3.8 billion this year, the agency’s inspector general says in a report.

Employees spent $792,022 on meals and external events “without justification for food purchases, purchased alcohol without officer approval and exceeded the dollar limit for meals,” the report says.

Among the purchases were crab cakes, beef Wellington and scallops at an installation ceremony for one of several postmasters in the United States, the report says.

[…]The Postal Service reported a $3.8 billion net loss for the 2009 fiscal year…

University of Michigan links government bailouts to corruption.

Excerpt:

U.S. banks that spent more money on lobbying were more likely to get government bailout money, according to a study released on Monday. Banks whose executives served on Federal Reserve boards were more likely to receive government bailout funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, according to the study from Ran Duchin and Denis Sosyura, professors at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Banks with headquarters in the district of a U.S. House of Representatives member who serves on a committee or subcommittee relating to TARP also received more funds. Political influence was most helpful for poorly performing banks, the study found. “Political connections play an important role in a firm’s access to capital,” Sosyura, a University of Michigan assistant professor of finance, said in a statement. Banks with an executive who sat on the board of a Federal Reserve Bank were 31 percent more likely to get bailouts through TARP’s Capital Purchase Program, the study showed. Banks with ties to a finance committee member were 26 percent more likely to get capital purchase program funds.

South Carolina Attorney General will investigate Ben Nelson’s Obamacare bribe.

Excerpt:

South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster said Tuesday that he intends to organize his counterparts in different states to investigate dealmaking that sealed a final compromise on federal health care legislation.

McMaster said the language of the Nelson provision appears to give the State of Nebraska a permanent exemption from paying the Medicaid expenses all other states in the nation will be required to pay.

Attorney General Henry McMaster said he and his counterparts in Alabama, Colorado, Michigan, North Dakota, Texas and Washington state—all Republicans—are jointly taking a look at the deal they’ve dubbed the ‘Nebraska compromise.’

The ‘Nebraska compromise,’ which permanently exempts Nebraska from paying Medicaid costs that Texas and all other 49 states must pay, may violate the United States Constitution—as well as other provisions of federal law.’

White House pressuring pro-life Democrat to pass health care.

Excerpt:

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said the White House and the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives have been pressuring him not to speak out on the “compromise” abortion language in the Senate version of the health care bill.

“They think I shouldn’t be expressing my views on this bill until they get a chance to try to sell me the language,” Stupak told CNSNews.com in an interview on Tuesday. “Well, I don’t need anyone to sell me the language. I can read it. I’ve seen it. I’ve worked with it. I know what it says. I don’t need to have a conference with the White House. I have the legislation in front of me here.”

CBO double-counted Medicare savings in estimate provided prior to Senate vote.

Excerpt:

The key point is that the savings to the HI (Medicare Hospital Insurance) trust fund under the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs.

To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.

One nice things about capitalism and small government is that it minimizes corruption and waste. (Companies trying to make a profit don’t waste, and they don’t try to influence government if government stays out of the free market). But some people like big government because they think that they should have their lives subsidized by their neighbors. A vote for a Democrat is a vote for corruption and waste.

Commentary

The Wall Street Journal explains what Obamacare will mean to you

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Amazing article in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T ECM)

Here are a few of the points made in the article.

1) The bill is being rammed through behind closed doors, with no Republican input.

Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world’s greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new “manager’s amendment” that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what’s in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.

2) Health care costs will increase if the bill passes.

The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.

3) Americans will have fewer choices.

Unnoticed by the press corps, the Congressional Budget Office argued recently that the Senate bill would so “substantially reduce flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private sellers of health insurance” that companies like WellPoint might need to “be considered part of the federal budget.”

4) The quality of care will be diminished.

Ultimately, “our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all,” as Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier recently wrote in our pages. Take the $2 billion annual tax—rising to $3 billion in 2018—that will be leveled against medical device makers, among the most innovative U.S. industries.

5) Your taxes will almost certainly increase.

Other budget priorities like education will be crowded out when about 21% of the U.S. population is on Medicaid, the joint state-federal program intended for the poor. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman calculates that ObamaCare will result in $2.5 billion in new costs for his state that “will be passed on to citizens through direct or indirect taxes and fees,” as he put it in a letter to his state’s junior Senator.

And it continues on. At one point, you may notice that the article says that private medical insurers will be forced to convert into public utilities administered by the federal government. You can read more about that here. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

One telling sign of the relevance of this analysis comes from the Congressional Budget Office (“CBO”). In a recent release, it has treated the proposal as if it nationalizes much of the private health insurance industry, most specifically because it may well require that rebates to customers kick in whenever, in its words, “medical loss ratios are less than 90 percent.”[2] In plain English, the Reid Bill assumes that health-care administration, which is always costly, can be done cheaply even in the new legal environment, so cheaply in fact that these health-insurance rebates kick in whenever insurers’ administrative expenses exceed 10 percent of their premium dollar. As the CBO has concluded, “this further expansion of the federal government’s role in the health insurance market would make such insurance an essentially governmental program …”

In effect, the onerous obligations under the Reid Bill would convert private health insurance companies into virtual public utilities. This action is not only a source of real anxiety but also a decision of constitutional proportions, for it systematically strips the regulated health-insurance issuers of their constitutional entitlement to earn a reasonable rate of return on the massive amounts of capital that they have already invested in building out their businesses.

Yesterday, I posted about the CBO estimates for this bill coming in at 2.5 trillion, with 1 trillion dollars of new taxes. Before that, I mentioned that dissenters like Ben Nelson are receiving special grants of taxpayer money for their states in order to change their vote, despite the fact that the health care bill will use the tax dollars of pro-lifers to perform abortions. Please consider calling your members of the House of Representatives to tell them to vote no on this bill!

News

CBO says that Obamacare will require 1 trillion tax increase

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Story at the Weekly Standard. (H/T Weasel Zippers via ECM)

Excerpt:

…In its real first 10 years (2014 to 2023), the CBO says that the bill would cost $1.8 trillion — for insurance coverage expansions alone. Other parts of the bill would cost approximately $700 billion more, bringing the bill’s full 10-year tab to approximately $2.5 trillion — according to the CBO.

In those real first 10 years (2014 to 2023), Americans would have to pay over $1 trillion in additional taxes, over $1 trillion would be siphoned out of Medicare (over $200 billion out of Medicare Advantage alone) and spent on Obamacare, and deficits would rise by over $200 billion.

…the CBO says that health care premiums would rise… Nationwide health care costs would be $234 billion higher than under current law. How’s that for “reform”?

…The CBO estimates that, from 2015-25, private insurers would receive $1.0 trillion in subsidies from the American taxpayer — the insurers’ apparent price for giving up their freedom and being controlled by the government. Congress would mandate that Americans buy the insurers’ product and would redirect massive sums of taxpayer money to make that mandate more feasible.

That’s to freak out my fiscally conservative readers.

My socially conservative readers are already horrified that taxes collected from them will soon be used to pay for abortions. Obama doesn’t want people who are irresponsible about sex to be “punished with a baby”.