“A close examination of CBO’s work and other evidence undercuts this budget-busting argument about repeal and leads to the exact opposite conclusion, which is that repeal is the logical first step toward restoring fiscal sanity.”
“In fighting against Obamacare repeal this week, Democrats portray their health care law as a money saver, claiming Republicans would add to the deficit by abolishing the legislation. But in their franker moments, the bill’s authors admit that “reform” could be something of a time bomb that will cause exploding health care costs down the line. One top Senate aide plainly stated last summer, “This is a coverage bill, not a cost reduction bill.” The time-bomb nature of Obamacare was presaged by Mitt Romney’s health care bill in Massachusetts, which also expanded health insurance coverage by mandating that all individuals buy insurance, prohibiting insurers from dropping customers, and subsidizing the insurance of those with difficulty affording it.”
“But that aside, Obamacare’s fiscal failure comes down to something a lot more basic: Government agencies nearly always overestimate the revenue generated from tax increases, and nearly always underestimate the new spending caused by new entitlements. Americans are a lot smarter than they look from inside the Beltway, and they modify their behavior to avoid new taxes and obtain new largesse. Federal bureaucrats may be good with calculators, but they’re weak on human nature.”
“Defenders of ObamaCare have seized upon a Jan. 6 letter from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to House Speaker John Boehner alleging that repeal would ‘increase the deficit.’ Don’t be bamboozled. When big spenders call for ‘deficit reduction,’ they mean raising your taxes. That is what ObamaCare does.”
“Of all the claims deployed in favor of ObamaCare, and there are many, the most preposterous is that a new open-ended entitlement will somehow reduce the budget deficit. Insure 32 million more people, and save money too! The even more remarkable spectacle is that Washington seems to be taking this claim seriously in advance of the House’s repeal vote next week. Some things in politics you just can’t make up.”
The American voters, most of whom have been around long enough and who have grown skeptical enough about politicians’ math skills, understand this intuitively. They see the pile of debt, a huge new program and shout: ‘Stop!’ In electoral terms, ‘stop’ means 63 House and 6 Senate seats. That’s why the Democrats would be wise to junk the ‘covering millions more saves money!’ argument. It’s not working, and by repeating it they simply convince voters that they are out to lunch.”
Even a liberal columnist and ObamaCare supporter doesn’t believe the law’s deficit projections. “But the costs of the new law are far more certain than the savings. Anyone who’s spent any time in Washington knows better than to assume that health-care reform will end up as a money saver. Democrats will, I suspect, have ample opportunities to accuse Republicans of hypocrisy on fiscal responsibility. This isn’t one of them. And there are stronger defenses of the new law than to claim that repeal would be a budget buster.”
“Regional variation in Medicare spending is not correlated with variation in non-Medicare spending, and variation in non-Medicare spending is associated with measures of disease burden and health status. The data indicate that something is deeply wrong not with the doctors or the patients but with Medicare’s payment system, service mix, and incentives.”
“If Congress is really serious about reducing long-term deficits, the best path forward is to accept the CBO report for what it is and also set aside PAYGO in favor of real budget process reform. In the meantime, repealing Obamacare is the right step toward reducing the federal deficit and getting health care reform right.”
“The current Medicaid program is arguably the worst health insurance plan in the country. It has expanded massively beyond the original intent in 1965 and is now one of the two or three largest budget items for nearly every state. In spite
of massive annual increases in spending, Medicaid chronically experiences budgetbreaking costs. Expanding Medicaid, as the new health care reform law requires,
will only compound these problems.”