House Republicans created a report card for ObamaCare 90 days in, cataloguing the failing grades the bill received on issues like costs to families, job creation, and deficit reduction.
“In March, Washington looked America squarely in the eye and promised the $1 trillion health care overhaul would reduce the deficit and save Medicare. Moreover, our political leaders assured seniors they could keep their physician. Now reality sets in. None of this was true.”
The Congressional Budget Office has determined that ObamaCare’s program to create high-risk pools to cover the uninsured until 2014 will fail unless they are heavily restricted or cost an extra $5 to $10 billion. “Healthcare reform’s high-risk insurance pools could end up excluding hundreds of thousands of Americans or costing three times more than what’s budgeted now, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday.”
Looking at the problems ObamaCare is likely to cause for the federal budget and American businesses and families, repealing it is far from impossible. Other unpopular or ill-conceived health care measures have been repealed in the recent past before their enactment. “President Barack Obama’s signatures on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act do not end the national debate on federal control of health care. The debate merely enters a new and perhaps even more difficult and divisive phase. Based on current revelations and previous experience, this continuing debate gives Congress ample justification to repeal Obamacare. At the very least, Congress can dismantle or defund its damaging provisions.”
Despite promises that ObamaCare would be fully paid for and reduce the budget deficit, many of the savings will not materialize when the time comes. Firstly, it is extremely difficult from a technical perspective to correctly assess costs so far in the future. Secondly, many of the promised cuts are scheduled to take place far in the future in order to delay the political consequences of unpopular provisions, but future Congresses might not be willing to pay the political price for those cuts.
The Democrats promised to include a “doc fix” in ObamaCare to prevent doctors’ payments under Medicare from being cut, then pulled the “doc fix” to make ObamaCare’s financial projections look better, and now — with ObamaCare already using every obvious offset — can’t come up with the funds for something that would otherwise have had wide bipartisan support.
With the Medicare chief actuary predicting that ObamaCare would cause overall health-care costs to rise, with an Obama administration study predicting that perhaps a majority of private employers would be forced to change and/or drop their health plans, and with the CBO estimating that ObamaCare would cost $115 billion more than previously predicted, even government sources seem to be confirming that Congress did indeed “have to pass the bill” for the fog to lift so that Americans could “find out what was in it.”
From the reality sinking in that there would be a strong financial incentive under ObamaCare for businesses to stop providing health insurance, to the administration’s own estimate that recently drawn-up draft regulations could cause over 100 million Americans to lose their coverage, it is becoming obvious to more and more Americans that ObamaCare is nothing like its Democratic proponents promised it would be.
Increased spending from ObamaCare will destroy up to 700,000 jobs over the next 10 years. This result was found using the methodology of a study by the Center for American Progress, pushed by President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, which claimed that hundreds of thousands of jobs would be created “almost immediately” by ObamaCare. The difference in results is because CAP assumed the bill would lower health spending, while this new study is based on the conclusions of both the Congressional Budget Office and Medicare’s chief actuary that the bill will substantially increase national health spending.
Early retiree insurance costs are significant for many employers, and one of ObamaCare’s selling points was $5 billion in new funds to be given away to companies to cover those costs. But the fund won’t help much and businesses won’t get the benefits they were promised, because the fund is so small it will quickly run out. “Confusion over how the money will be distributed is frustrating employers, consultants and applicants say. ‘They’re already getting nervous,’ said Derek Guyton, a partner and actuary with human resources consultancy Mercer LLC in Chicago. ‘At some point, the money will just run out,’ he insists. Mr. Guyton said midsize employers are questioning whether it’s worth applying for the funding since it requires time-consuming calculations.”