More projections about the costs of health care – it’s painful
By JR Hoeft | Thursday, March 18th, 2010 | PolicyLater today we should know what the Congressional Budget Office thinks regarding the overall cost of the health care bill, and Stephen Spruiell of the National Review doesn’t have a whole lot of confidence that those numbers will even be acknowledged by House Democrats. Spruiell writes that a little known change to how federal student loan guarantees are administered promises to save billions for Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“[U]nder the rules of reconciliation, the package must reduce the deficit by at least $1 billion. Clearly that’s not going to happen, so Pelosi’s plan involves attaching a separate student-loan bill to the reconciliation package and using the “savings” from that bill to fund the health-care cost overrun.”
The problem, says Spruiell, is that Democrats are going to assume low borrowing rates for the government to “save” nearly $68 billion to offset their spending “fixes” that they have placed into the reconcilliation bill, yet the likelihood is that those rates are going to increase. Actual savings is more than likely around $40 billion, but that number, provided by the CBO, is likely to be ignored by the Speaker.
So, even if the CBO does come out with their cost estimates today, will the Speaker even listen?
Also, yesterday, the Americans for Tax Reform released their numbers about projected job losses due to the passage of health care reform. Far from stimulus, the bill, over multiple sectors of the economy, stands to lose up to 700,000 jobs by 2019.
Additionally, The Medicus Firm, a physician search firm primarily out of Dallas and Atlanta, relates:
“24.7% of physicians stated that they would “retire early” if a public option is implemented, and an additional 21.0% of respondents stated that they would quit practicing medicine, even though they are nowhere near retirement. This brings the amount of physicians who would leave medicine to a total of 45.7%.” (h/t: Virginia Virtucon, Weekly Standard)
Finally, this debate might not really be about health care reform at all, merely one segment of the health care industry challenging another. As reported in the Washington Examiner, Pharmaceutical interests have been heavily lobbying Democrats and the administration over this bill.
Of all the single-industry lobbies in Washington, the largest is the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America. PhRMA spent $26.2 million on lobbying last year — that’s nearly three times as much as the insurance lobby, America’s Health Insurance Plans, which spent $8.9 million.
If you include individual companies’ lobbying, pharmaceuticals blow away the competition, beating all other industries by 50 percent, according to data at the Center for Responsive Politics.
Given this Big Pharma clout, it’s unsurprising that the bill Obama’s whipping for — Senate bill — has nearly everything the drug companies wanted: prohibiting reimportation of drugs, preserving Medicare’s overpayment for drugs, lengthy exclusivity for biotech drugs, a mandate that states subsidize drugs under Medicaid, hundreds of billions in subsidies for drugs, and more.
PhRMA chief Billy Tauzin, who was vilified by Obama on the campaign trail, worked out much of this sweetheart deal in a West Wing meeting with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Tauzin visited the White House at least 11 times. He left his imprint so deeply on the current bill that it should probably be called BillyCare rather than ObamaCare. (h/t: Tertium Quids)
It’s enough to make you want to take an aspirin.
Tags:
Contribute for Conservatism!
Share this post
About the author
Conservative to the core; liberal with his opinion! J.R. has been involved in politics for over a decade and has worked on several campaigns in Hampton Roads. He has served on the Executive Committee of the Republican Party of Chesapeake and the Central Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia. He is also the director of “Blogs United” in Virginia. E-mail J.R.. Follow J.R. on Twitter.
Comments
7 Responses to "More projections about the costs of health care – it’s painful"
That stat about doctors retiring because of a public option doesn’t stand up. Why should doctors care if there is a public option? They will get paid faster than they would if they dealt with uninsured patients. Did doctors retire because of the enactment of Medicare, or because of Champus? I doubt it seriously.
Congressional budget scorekeepers say President Barack Obama’s health care bill would reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over 10 years.
The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday the $940-billion legislation would provide coverage to 32 million people now uninsured by 2016, bring the total number of insured to about 95 percent of eligible Americans.
The CBO is taking into account that we are paying for this boondoggle for 4 years before it even goes into effect.
Pay additonal taxes/fees for years without getting a paid return for 4 years, and yes, that has a temporary effect of reducing the balance owed. Then the other shoe drops and it no longer looks so fiscally attractive.
And the CBO can’t fully score this bill until it looks at the so called fixes in the accompanying bill. Because they have not scored that yet. So this number that everyone is throwing around is a bit premature.
Yes, of course there is legitimate frustration at the difficulty of getting reasonable estimates. But one thing no one can deny; the Bill will provide access to health care to all americans, and to me, that is a major step forward. My hope would be that once the Bill passes, and the opposition realizes that it is done, that they will rejoin the process to strengthen the cost containment provisions instead of using scare tactics and fear mongering as a tactic to forestall any legislation. Passing this bill, progress; health care for all americans, priceless.
Actually mike the CBO estimate is that this wil only cover a about 60-65 percent those who are currently uninsured…
2nd… doctors do care about the public option, because it like Medicare and Medicaid doesn’t cover the full cost of treatment.. only the marginal cost. So doctors will continue to take medicare patients as long as they have enough private patients to cover their fixed costs. This is called cost shifting. But as you move more and mroe people from private to public, this becomes harder and harder. We are already seeing shortages of doctiors taking new medicare and medicaid patients due to this. This health plan, which pushes more people into public, especially if their is a public option, will continue this trend.
We can all feel good about ourselves that people have insurance, but it will increasingly not be able to do anything because you won be able to find a doctor… particuarly in poorer areas where a larger maoutn of the population is on public plans. Healthcare will be free, but nothing will be available.
while at the same time, this makes high deductable health insurance plans essentially illegal and forces comprehensive plans… this reduces the amount of out of pocket expences and exasserbates the moral hazard problem of over healthcare consumption. This will have the effect of drivig up prices more as its an immediate increase in demand for healthcare while at the same time we have a structural supply problem. Essentially this bill doubles down on all the stuff that has contributed to making out system as costly as it currently is. But then again that was the dems plan all along. This bill was supposed to be a glide path for the public option which int ern would become single payer. Now they are just left with a nation version of the Mass system, which is going bankrupt. And just as those suposedly brainless conservatibves had been shouting that rationing would occur, Massachusetts recently just cut 30,000 LEGAL immigrants out of the system because they don’t vote. And this is prom “progressive” massachusetts.
Leave your response
The comments section is for meaningful discussion. Readers are reminded to post comments that are germane to the article and write in a common language that steers clear of personal attacks and/or vulgarities.
Please take a moment to review our comment policy.