Tag Archives: Costs

News

How Obamacare took away my liberty

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From Health Care BS. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

1. Don’t need or want a health insurance policy? Sorry, the individual mandate makes it a federal crime not to buy insurance.

2. Want to pay less in premiums by buying health insurance coverage with limits on coverage? Sorry, Obamacare also dictates how much coverage you must buy (including maternity coverage if you are a single male).

4. As an employer, you’d like to offer your employees high-deductible coverage or policies that don’t cover “children” as old as age 26? Sorry, that’s now illegal.

5. As a business-owner with 100 employees, you want to expand your sales and hire a few more people? Sorry, if you hire one more person, Obamacare requires you to buy insurance for all your employees.

6. You’re a physician and don’t want the government looking over your shoulder? Sorry, the HHS is now authorized to use your claims data to measure the resources you use.

Taking money from small businesses? That reduces the supply of jobs. Making doctors jump through hoops? That reduces the supply of doctors.

From Carrie Lukas at National Review. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Last night, Speaker Pelosi reiterated that passing the health-care legislation means that “Being a woman will no longer be a pre-existing medical condition.” It’s true that outlawing gender ratings will effectively shift women’s health costs to men (which means young men will see their health-insurance premiums rise disproportionately). Yet the Senate bill makes being a single mom a new kind of pre-existing condition: Instead of higher insurance premiums, these women will have fewer employment opportunities. Congratulations Mrs. Speaker.

What happens when you take money away from healthy single men? They don’t marry because they can’t afford to become husbands and fathers. Government replaces men as husbands and fathers. That’s what this health care bill does.

News

CBO estimates Obamacare cost to be 2 trillion from 2014-2023

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From the Weekly Standard. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The CBO says that Obamacare would cost $2.0 trillion in the bill’s real first decade (from 2014 to 2023) — and much more in the decades to come.

But $2.0 trillion wouldn’t be the total ten-year costs. Instead, that would merely be the “gross cost of coverage provisions.” Based on earlier incarnations of the proposed overhaul, the total costs would be about a third higher (the exact number can’t be gleaned from the CBO’s analysis, which is only preliminary and is not a full scoring) — making the total price-tag between $2.5 and $3 trillion over the bill’s real first decade.

How would we pay for all of this? According to the CBO, by diverting $1.1 trillion away from already barely-solvent Medicare and spending it on Obamacare, and by increasing taxes on the American people by over $1 trillion. Among the Medicare cuts would be cuts of $25,000 in Medicare Advantage benefits per enrollee — up from $21,000 in the previous scoring.

[…]We’d also pay for this through increased deficits.  Under strict instructions from the Democrats, the CBO gave Obamacare credit for over $400 billion (from 2014 to 2023) in phony “savings” that would allegedly result from cutting doctor’s payments under Medicare by over 20 percent and never raising them back up.  As the CBO notes, one of two things could happen:  Congress could either follow through on these severe pay cuts — in which case doctors would view all Medicare patients as if they have the plague — or, Congress could eliminate these pay cuts — as everyone in Washington expects to have happen under the so-called “doc fix” — in which case the CBO projects that this bill would raise deficits by over $100 billion from 2017 to 2019 alone.

So, after racking up higher deficit spending in two years than President Bush (or any other president) did in two terms, President Obama would leave his successor a 12-figure deficit related to Obamacare alone — for the period from 2017 to 2019 alone.  That’s according to the CBO.

Someone is going to have to pay for all of this spending. Either taxes are going to go up so that we are all out of a job, or the government will print money and devalue the currency via inflation. I hope the young people who voted for Obama like the taste of grass – because that’s all they’ll be eating for the rest of their lives if this spending keeps up.

News

Massachusetts treasurer says Obamacare could wipe out the economy in 4 years

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Story here from Business Week. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The Massachusetts treasurer said Tuesday that Congress will “threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years” if it adopts a health care overhaul modeled after the Bay State’s.

Treasurer Timothy Cahill — a former Democrat running as an independent for governor — said the 2006 law has succeeded only because of huge subsidies and favorable regulatory changes from the federal government.

[…]Cahill said he’s called for the state to abandon its plan, and for the federal government not to match it.

He also gave reporters a copy of a state ledger sheet showing the state’s Medicaid program ballooning from $7.5 billion to a projected $9.2 billion since the health care law was adopted. Of the 407,000 newly insured, only 32 percent paid for insurance wholly on their own.

The remaining received partial or total taxpayer subsidies.

[…]Cahill [pointed] out the Obama administration is asking the House and Senate to approve a national plan that includes an “individual mandate,” similar to Massachusetts’, and an entity designed to match buyers with private health insurance plans.

Cahill said the Massachusetts equivalent, the Health Care Connector, had helped only 5 percent of those who bought private insurance without any type of government assistance.

While the Massachusetts program has increased access to health insurance, he said it hasn’t cut underlying cost increases, steering more people to a broken system.

“If President (Barack) Obama and the Democrats repeat the mistake of the health insurance reform adopted here in Massachusetts on a national level, they will threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years,” the treasurer said.

Let’s learn from the mistakes of others who tried to do what Obama is doing.