“President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a Republican member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.”
“The hidden shortfall between new spending and new taxes was revealed just after Supreme Court justices grilled the law’s supporters about its compliance with the Constitution’s limits on government activity. If the court doesn’t strike down the law, it will force taxpayers find another $17 trillion to pay for the increased spending. The $17 trillion in extra promises was revealed by an analysis of the law’s long-term requirements. The additional obligations, when combined with existing Medicare and Medicaid funding shortfalls, leaves taxpayers on the hook for an extra $82 trillion in health care obligations over the next 75 years.”
“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.”
“The IPAB was created by an act of the last Congress and is supposed to meet an arbitrary spending target that is not feasible without structural changes in Medicare and the health care delivery system. The IPAB has one tool—price controls—to hit the same kind of fiscal target that the SGR has. If the board requires politically unacceptable payment cuts, a future Congress will neutralize IPAB just as it has neutralized the SGR.”
“Landrieu, critics believe, pledged her vote in exchange for gaining $200 million additional federal funds for Louisiana’s Medicaid program. Except that, due to a drafting error, the law ended up giving Louisiana $4.3 billion in extra Medicaid funds: more than twenty times the assigned amount. How this happened, and how Congress failed to fully fix it, is a microcosm of our new health law’s many flaws.”
“The Obama administration’s top spokesperson on health care was unable to defend the president’s health overhaul law during a Senate hearing yesterday when she was confronted with the facts about a string of promises that already have been broken about law. Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was clearly flummoxed by a series of fact-based questions asked by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on March 7.”
“During the debate over the health care law, it was often argued that the added federal cost of the coverage provisions would be more than offset by other tax hikes and spending cuts. Indeed, it was suggested that the new law would actually reduce the longterm budget deficit. But this perspective rests critically on how one accounts for the Medicare taxes
and cuts that were enacted in the law, and specifically the taxes and cuts that were assigned to the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund.”
“If employers dump many of their workers onto the exchanges, as numerous independent analyses suggest is likely, taxpayers may need to spend as much as $200 billion a year extra on these exchange subsidies. Well, it turns out that the Obama Administration agrees that initial spending estimates are too low. The White House’s fiscal year 2013 budget adds $111 billion in exchange spending between 2014 and 2021, with even more spending to come in future years.”
“Sebelius basically just copped to a double-subversion of the Constitution: Congress appropriates money for X, but not Y. Sebelius says, ‘I know better than Congress. I’m going to take money away from X to fund Y.’ Sebelius has already shown contempt for the First Amendment, first by threatening insurance carriers with bankruptcy for engaging in non-fraudulent speech, and again by crafting a contraceptives mandate that violates religious freedom. Now, she has decided the whole separation of powers thing is for little people. What will Sebelius do the next time something gets in the way of her implementing ObamaCare?”
“The House on Wednesday evening voted to repeal a section of the 2010 health reform law establishing a voluntary, long-term healthcare program that the Obama administration has since said is not financially viable.
Members voted 267-159 in favor of the bill, H.R. 1173, which repeals the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program. While 28 Democrats joined Republicans in support of the bill, House passage sends the bill to a Democratic Senate that is expected to ignore the bill completely.”