“On March 13, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) updated its score of Obamacare, announcing that the program is $48 billion cheaper than in its previous 2011 score.
The primary reason for this change is that more individuals will lose their employer-provided coverage than originally anticipated, and the government will collect $99 billion more in taxes and penalties. CBO also finds that there are more uninsured individuals.
In short, this new CBO update continues the trend of Obamacare becoming increasingly expensive and decreasingly effective with each new scoring update.”
“As we approach the second anniversary of ObamaCare, it’s worth re-examining some of the claims its proponents made about the impact of the law on health-care costs. Three of the law’s most-touted cost-control measures have already been shown to be unlikely to succeed.”
“Yesterday, the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and with the shifted timeline, the ten-year cost of the law’s core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now escalated to $1.76 trillion. So I’ve created the updated graph below. Notice how low the numbers are in the 2010 to 2013 time period and how they quickly soar. All the spending to the right of the black line wasn’t reflected in the CBO’s estimate for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) at the time of passage.”
“When government requires firms to offer benefits, employers will generally prefer to hire part-time workers, who will not be subject to the penalty. Even though the Affordable Care Act counts part-time workers by aggregating their hours to determine the size of a firm, part-time workers are not subject to the $2,000 penalty. Hence, there will be fewer opportunities open for full-time work. Many workers who prefer to work full-time will have an even harder time finding jobs.
In January 2012 over 8 million people were working part-time because they could not find full-time jobs. The new health care law would exacerbate this problem.”
“The Obama administration’s controversial birth-control mandate saw its first legal challenge Thursday from an employer not affiliated with any religious institution. The latest challenge comes from the owner of a Missouri-based holding company, who says it violates his religious freedom. Although several other suits have been filed, they have all come from religious-affiliated employers such as Catholic universities.”
“As many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided coverage because of President Obama’s healthcare reform law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a new report Thursday.
The figure represents the worst-case scenario, CBO says, and the law could just as well increase the number of people with employer-based coverage by 3 million in 2019.”
“Top U.S. Catholic bishops on Wednesday formally made their fight against a White House mandate for reproductive services the church’s top priority, saying ‘this struggle for religious freedom’ demands their immediate attention… The statement represents an expanded public relations effort to oppose the mandate that most religious employers provide health-care coverage for employees, including contraception and sterilization, services forbidden by Catholic teaching.”
“The American public doesn’t support Obamacare, and a new survey shows that doctors have an even worse opinion. No one has a better grasp on the state of the health care system than physicians, and according to the Doctors Company survey, 60 percent of them believe that Obamacare will have a negative impact on overall patient care. This survey is consistent with the findings of another doctor survey taken in October 2010, which also showed doctors’ lack of confidence in Obamacare.”