“So here’s the bottom line: The new health reform law does have three notable cost-control mechanisms — two of which are very aggressive. None of the three, however, are likely to achieve their objective.”
A new ObamaCare calculator from The Heritage Foundation lets you analyze how the costs of the bill would change if certain assumptions used by the Congressional Budget Office are incorrect.
When the Congressional Budget Office develops budget estimates, they use a static analysis that only measures direct revenues and expenditures. A dynamic analysis looks at the amount of lost productivity from ObamaCare’s huge tax increases to determine that the economy will produce $706 billion less than it would otherwise. This lost value means the actual debt will be $753 billion higher after 10 years because of ObamaCare.
ObamaCare was promised to protect and preserve the Medicare program. But as confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office and the Medicare actuaries, money being is double-counted as both being saved for Medicare and being used to reduce the deficit. Thus it raided hundreds of billions of dollars from the Medicare program to pay for a new entitlement. Furthermore, new cost savings programs are likely to fail, while proven programs, like Medicare Advantage, were dramatically restricted.
“Two new studies highlight the growing concern that the true cost for Obamacare is greater than originally anticipated. Last week, a new report from the Office of the Actuary at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) revised its estimates—exposing yet again that the new law will mean more health care spending, not less. Plus, the Congressional Research Service released a report that suggests states will face higher costs as a result of ObamaCare.”
“When a government report found that President Barack Obama’s health overhaul would modestly raise the nation’s total health care tab, the White House responded with a statistic suggesting costs would go down. Health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle wrote on the White House blog last week that the same government report indicates spending per insured person will be more than $1,000 lower in 2019 because of the law — some 9 percent below previous projections… It turns out that may be fuzzy math.”
“This paper presents updated national health spending projections for 2009–2019 that take into account recent comprehensive health reform legislation and other relevant changes in law and regulations. Relative to our February 2010 projections under prior law, average annual growth in national health spending over the projection period is estimated to be 0.2 percentage point higher than our previous estimate. The health care share of gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to be 0.3 percentage point higher in 2019. Within these net overall impacts are larger differences for trends in spending and spending growth by payer, attributable to reform’s many major changes to health care coverage and financing.”
“Actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported today in Health Affairs that overall health spending will constitute 20 percent of the economy by 2019, up from 17 percent now. An Associated Press article about the report says that ‘factoring in the law, Americans will spend an average of $13,652 per person a year on health care in 2019. . . . Without the law, the corresponding number would be $13,387. That works out to $265 more with the overhaul.’That hardly ‘bends the cost curve down,’ as Mr. Obama and his allies in Congress repeatedly promised the law would do. And it does not take the burden of rising health-care costs off the backs of struggling consumers or businesses — again, as they promised.”
ObamaCare was supposed to have “bent the cost curve” and lowered health spending in family budgets and the federal budget. But it does nothing to lower costs, and Instead the huge new government program will accelerate spending growth.
“They now understand that the public has not, and will not, buy the argument that a government takeover of American health care will somehow lower costs. Americans have long understood that Obamacare is a massive new spending commitment, piled on top of the unaffordable ones already on the federal books. That’s a recipe for financial disaster, not deficit cutting. The solution is repeal coupled with a reform that puts consumers, not the government, in charge of controlling costs. That’s the way to fix health care — and the budget too. And, yes, it can be done.”