Later 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.
