Even though the American people don’t want government-run healthcare, and even though Democrats are very nervous after losing a supposedly-safe Senate seat in Massachusetts, Obamacare is not dead. The Democrats still have huge majorities in the House and Senate and the White House clearly is trying to put the GOP back on the defensive. Exhibit A is the President’s invitation for a televised healthcare summit on February 25. Exhibit B is the fact that the Congressional Budget Office has greased the skids by concocting preposterous estimates that government-run healthcare will reduce the budget deficit. This may seem like meaningless wonkery, but it could allow the Democrats to use the “reconciliation” process to impose Obamacare with just 51 votes in the Senate. Here are two reminders of why it is utterly absurd to think that a giant new entitlement program will reduce red tape. First, we have an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal column about how the “cost curve” is bending up rather than down. Second, we have a Center for Freedom and Prosperity video that looks at the evidence confirming that government-run healthcare will be a budget buster:
- Richard Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, reports that under his analysis national health spending will rise under the bills by $222 billion over the next 10 years. In other words, ObamaCare really does “bend the cost curve”—up. Even that estimate exists only on paper, as Mr. Foster has the honesty to admit. Because “most of the coverage provisions would be in effect for only six of the 10 years of the budget period, the cost estimates shown in this memorandum do not represent a full 10-year cost for the proposed legislation,” he writes. The report is punctuated by phrases like “unrealistic” and “doubtful,” and Mr. Foster adds that “the scope and magnitude of these changes are such that few precedents exist for use in estimation.” …ObamaCare is “paid for” only in the sense that Medicare’s payments to doctors are assumed in the bill to be cut by more than 20% this spring and even deeper after that, which will never happen in practice. …As for the White House’s promise that it will reduce health spending painlessly by cutting “waste,” Mr. Foster isn’t buying it. He writes that “we find the language as it now reads is not sufficiently specific to provide estimates.” The report also calls out the new entitlement program for long-term care, which is included only because it will start collecting premiums five years before it starts paying benefits. In return for this accounting gimmick, the fisc will be saddled with a program that Mr. Foster estimates will be bankrupt by 2025.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703652104574652563562 216036.html
