“The truth is the president and his allies in Congress worked overtime to pull together every Medicare cut they could find – nearly $500 billion in all over ten years – and put them into the health law to pay for the massive entitlement expansion they so coveted. They could have used those cuts to pay for the “doc fix” if they had wanted to, as well as for a slightly less expansive health program. But that’s not what they did.”
“Should everyone be required to have health insurance? The short answer is no.”
“Never before have I seen a CBO Director so bluntly refute the policy claims of a President and his Budget Director.”
The Senate health care bill (which, along with the Reconciliation Act, became law) would overhaul the entire health-care sector of the U.S. economy by erecting massive federal controls over private health insurance; dictating the content of insurance benefit-packages and the usage of medical treatments, procedures, and devices; altering the relationship between the federal government and the states; transferring massive regulatory power to the federal government; and restricting Americans’ personal and economic freedom by imposing unprecedented mandates on businesses and individuals, including an individual mandate to buy insurance.
The Senate health-care overhaul (which, along with the Reconciliation Act, became law) contains a stealth “public option,” which has been disguised and given a false identity. Under that legislation, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) would be empowered to offer government-sponsored and effectively government-run (though privately administered) health plans, which would be the only health plans in America permitted to compete on a national or multi-state basis. This advantage, along with partial exemptions from state and federal regulatory standards, enticing opportunities for collusion between OPM and the Department of Health and Human Services, and the strong possibility of government subsidies for the public plan at taxpayer expense, means that these plans wouldn’t be competing with private plans on anything like even terms — and the effect on ordinary Americans’ health care would largely be the same as under a transparent public option.
House passage of the Senate version of ObamaCare means higher health costs, higher deficits, higher taxes, higher premiums, incentives for employers to drop employees’ insurance, incentives for employers to avoid hiring low-income workers, financial penalties for entering into marriage, further expansion of Medicaid and the launching of a new entitlement program, and the ushering in of a culture of statism and dependency in lieu of limited government and liberty.
As ObamaCare stands poised to limit or possibly ban popular high-deductible insurance plans — which are paired with health savings accounts (HSAs) to give patients more control over their own health-care dollars — a new insurance survey shows that the number of Americans enrolled in HSAs has increased ten-fold in just five years and how now eclipsed 10 million.
In a study commissioned by the state of Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration, the Milliman consulting and actuarial firm concludes that ObamaCare would costs Indiana taxpayers $3.6 billion (in addition to their burden as federal taxpayers), as nearly one-quarter of Indiana residents would be on Medicaid by the end of the decade.
Ohio voters support the repeal of ObamaCare by 19 percentage points.
Rasmussen shows that Americans favor the repeal of ObamaCare by a 17-point margin (56 to 39 percent), with 61 percent of independents and 63 percent of seniors favoring repeal.