ObamaCare is poised to become another runaway entitlement program. Once the Congressional Budget Office’s cost-estimate is adjusted to reflect things for which it wasn’t allowed to make allowances — such as the omission of the “doc fix,” the CLASS Act gimmick, and the double-counting of money siphoned out of Medicare — it is clear that ObamaCare would raise costs, raise deficits, and reduce access to high-quality care for millions of Medicare recipients and other Americans.
“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.”
“Never before have I seen a CBO Director so bluntly refute the policy claims of a President and his Budget Director.”
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.
The Obama administration Monday unveiled a tax cut for small companies that provide health insurance, but business groups gave it a mixed review: Many small businesses won’t qualify for the tax credit, they say.
According to the CBO’s newest estimate, should Congress approve all of the additional spending called for by ObamaCare, the 10-year cost of the legislation would exceed $1 trillion – and almost all of the administration’s highly touted savings would disappear.
The Community Living Assistance Services and Support (CLASS) Act, buried deep within ObamaCare, is a program of front-loaded funding and back-loaded spending that even Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, an ObamaCare supporter, calls “a Ponzi scheme of the first order.” The CLASS Act is unsustainable, but it succeeded in artificially lowering ObamaCare’s cost-estimates by $70 billion. It practically invites adverse selection, and, if it were to remain on the books, it would eventually result in higher deficits, higher premiums for those enrolled, compulsory enrollment, or a combination of those three.
Newt Gingrich thinks ObamaCare can and should be repealed, but until Americans elect enough ObamaCare opponents to Congress and the White House to bring that about, he says that ObamaCare opponents (almost all of them Republicans) have a duty to use Congress’s power of the purse to deny funding and thereby thwart its implementation.
A new study by a former head of the Congressional Budget Office says that ObamaCare would make dropping employees’ insurance the sensible choice for the employers of up to 35 million workers — with the workers’ concurrence. These workers would flood into the government-run exchanges, which would then cost about $1 trillion more than projected over the next decade — essentially doubling ObamaCare’s published price and leading to massive new debt. Once in the exchanges, workers would find that their upward economic mobility would be strongly limited by the exchanges’ extremely high effective marginal tax-rates.