l****z 发帖数: 29846 | 1 Obamacare's Gross Costs Double to $1.76 Trillion, CBO Projects
Wednesday, March 14, 2012 10:29 AM
By: Richard Wagner and Martin Gould
The gross costs of the national healthcare law rammed through Congress by
President Barack Obama will reach an estimated $1.76 trillion over 10 years
– nearly twice the amount originally projected.
The figure, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed on
Wednesday, is bound to cause embarrassment to the administration as it comes
just as debate on “Obamacare” is starting to heat up again, two weeks
before the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on whether the Affordable
Care Act is unconstitutional.
Immediately the revelation stirred controversy among opponents of the bill.
“Both fiscally and for the sake of our health care system, Americans cannot
afford the president’s healthcare law,” said Georgia Rep. Tom Price,
chairman of the Republican Policy Committee.
“The longer the president’s healthcare law remains on the books, the
greater the threat it poses to our nation’s healthcare and our fiscal well-
being,” said Price, an orthopedic surgeon.
“The CBO’s revised cost estimate indicates that this massive government
intrusion into America’s health care system will be far more costly than
was originally claimed. The law’s true cost to American taxpayers is part
of a series of promises President Obama and Democrats in Congress made that
will be broken,: he said.
Healthcare expert Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New
York State, told Newsmax that the original cost projections of the plan were
“a shell game” and that the new report “inches closer to the truth”
about the cost of the reforms.
But the administration immediately tried to claim the report actually will
result in savings. “The bottom line is clear: the Affordable Care Act will
reduce our deficit, control health costs and make health care more
affordable,” Jeanne Lambrew, deputy director of the White House office of
Health Reform, wrote on the White House blog.
Lambrew also quoted both the Urban Institute and Thomson Reuters Consulting
as saying few employers would drop insurance coverage as a result of the act.
McCaughey said the White House was selective in its figures. She said the
consulting company McKinsey estimated that half of all employers who know
about the costs of the law plan to drop health coverage and said the
Heritage Foundation had discovered that the average cost of insurance will
go up by $5.51 an hour for a full-time employee.
Original White House estimates said the gross cost of the healthcare act
would be $940 billion over a decade, but the CBO’s new figures raise that
figure to a shade under $1.5 trillion. For the 10 years from 2013-2022 that
increases even further to $1.76 trillion.
Writing in the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein said, “Democrats employed
many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health
care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full
implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the
CBO's standard 10-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama's
pledge that the legislation would cost ‘around $900 billion over 10 years.
’”
“When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the
true 10-year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections
accounted for full implementation,” he added.
Though the CBO report, signed by director Douglas Elmendorf, projects the
gross cost of the healthcare reforms will balloon, it says the net cost
could go down because the economic recovery is now expected to be slower
than expected, insurance costs are rising more slowly and more people are
expected to get coverage from Medicaid.
McCaughey said, “The real key is that the administration 's experts are
gloomier now about the economy than they were last year.
“And the admission that more people are going to be put on Medicaid marks a
national transition that will change the nature of the country. One third
of all people not eligible for Medicare will now be on Medicaid.
“Currently 150 million people get their health insurance on the job. That
will change. The White House would like to ignore this, but the ugly facts
are coming out.” |
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