CBO Destroys A Core Obama Health Care Argument on costs.

[Soul Crusher]

CBO Director Elmendorf Destroys A Core Presidential Health Care Argument
1/13  Source: CBO
www.businessinsider.com
________________________ ________________________ ___                 

Keith Hennessey | Jun. 2, 2010, 8:14 AM | 2,250 |  5

(This is a guest post from economist Keith Hennessey.)

CBO Director Dr. Douglas Elmendorf has posted the slides he used in a presentation Wednesday to the Institute of Medicine, titled “Health Costs and the Federal Budget.”  The presentation obliterates the claims of the President and his allies about the effects of the new laws on federal health spending and the budget.

For months the President and his Budget Director correctly argued that the goal of health care reform was to “bend the cost curve down.”  The projected path of per capita health spending is unsustainable and will result in three bad outcomes:

1.those with health insurance will have less money available for other needs;
2.it will be harder for the uninsured to buy insurance; and
3.government spending on Medicare and Medicaid will break federal and state budgets.

Here is the President at the Blair House:

The third thing it seems — I assume we can all agree on is that over the last decade costs have doubled for health care in America — costs have doubled for government-provided health care, but everybody’s health care.  And that that meant that right now everybody knows that that wrecks budgets, it wrecks state budget, it wrecks family budgets, it wrecks federal budgets.  Every 35 cents of every dollar spent on health care is spent by the federal government or the state governments for Medicare and Medicaid — 35 cents on the dollar.  That doesn’t count veterans and other things, just those two.  And so — and what’s happened is — on the dollar, on every health care dollar.

And so we’re facing, all of us around this table, Democrat and Republicans, are facing the fact that there’s $919 billion now we’re spending on Medicare and the federal portion of Medicaid, and that if things — I don’t see any firewall is going to keep costs from doubling again, we’re going to be talking about in the year 2019 we’re going to be spending $1.7 trillion if we don’t do something to bend that curve.

A common refrain from the President and his Budget Director was “health care reform is entitlement reform.”  And through two budget cycles, when senior Administration officials were pressed on their plans for deficit reduction, they always returned to the argument that health care reform would substantially improve the federal budget outlook.

CBO Director Dr. Douglas Elmendorf has shown this argument to be incorrect.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the best and most direct presentation I have seen on the subject.  I commend Dr. Elmendorf for his honesty, clarity and bluntness.  I wish he had been this blunt and this clear in February and March before these bills became law.

Here is Dr. Elmendorf’s first slide.  Emphasis is mine.

The Challenge

Rising health costs will put tremendous pressure on the federal budget during the next few decades and beyond.  In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure.

Here he shows the effects on Medicare spending of the two new health care laws, as well as the effect if Congress permanently extends a Medicare “doctors’ fix” like the “temporary” one being considered in the House today.  The light blue line represents Medicare spending before the new laws, the dark blue line after the new laws, and the dotted line is the new laws plus a permanent doc fix.  You can see that there is net Medicare savings even with a permanent doc fix, but the unsustainable spending growth still exists.  And this is the part of the federal government where they “cut” (slowed the growth of) spending to pay for part of the new health care subsidies.

Now Dr. Elmendorf shows us the effects of the new laws on spending for Medicaid, CHIP, and the new health insurance subsidies  You can see how the new spending line (in light blue) is an enormous increase over the baseline spending in dark blue.


OK, now let’s examine the net effects of the two laws.


Since the dark blue bars are roughly the same height as the combination of the light blue bars, the net deficit effect shown by the line is right about zero.  Congressional Democratic leaders optimized to maximize coverage and minimize political pain from spending cuts and tax increases without increasing the deficit.  Had they instead focused on the the President’s stated priority of “bending the cost curve down,” this graph would have looked quite different.  The deficit reduction boasted about by the Administration and its allies is trivially small.

Dr. Elmendorf is direct:

The legislation will increase [the federal budgetary commitment to health care] by nearly $400 B during the 2010-2019 period but reduce it in the following decade.

The legislation will reduce budget deficits by about $140 billion during the 2010-2019 period and by an amount in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP during the following decade.

Q:  How can both these statements be true?  Over the next decade, how can the new laws increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care while reducing the deficit?

A:  By redirecting non-health dollars to health.  The increased Medicare payroll taxes on “the rich” are the best example.  These laws devote more federal resources to health care.  We were supposed to move the other way and devote less.

On February 23, 2009, the President said:

In the coming years, we’ll be forced to make more tough choices and do much more to address our long-term challenges, from the rising cost of health care that Peter described, which is the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far, to the long-term solvency of Social Security.

Once again Dr. Elmendorf debunks this claim that “it’s all about health cost growth.”  This graph shows that, at least for the next decade, most of the growth in federal entitlement spending is the result of aging.  Excess cost growth of health spending is a critically important but secondary factor.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/cbo-director-elmendorf-destroys-a-core-presidential-health-care-argument-2010-6#ixzz0phehPLnh

________________________ __

There are many graphs at the site but the point is that you idiots who supported ObamaCare on the premises that it was fiscally responsible were and still are fools for believing Obama and his bad of incompetent socialists and left wing hacks.   

[Mons Venus]

CBO Director Elmendorf Destroys A Core Presidential Health Care Argument
1/13  Source: CBO
www.businessinsider.com
________________________ ________________________ ___                

Keith Hennessey | Jun. 2, 2010, 8:14 AM | 2,250 |  5

(This is a guest post from economist Keith Hennessey.)

CBO Director Dr. Douglas Elmendorf has posted the slides he used in a presentation Wednesday to the Institute of Medicine, titled “Health Costs and the Federal Budget.”  The presentation obliterates the claims of the President and his allies about the effects of the new laws on federal health spending and the budget.

For months the President and his Budget Director correctly argued that the goal of health care reform was to “bend the cost curve down.”  The projected path of per capita health spending is unsustainable and will result in three bad outcomes:

1.those with health insurance will have less money available for other needs;
2.it will be harder for the uninsured to buy insurance; and
3.government spending on Medicare and Medicaid will break federal and state budgets.

Here is the President at the Blair House:

The third thing it seems — I assume we can all agree on is that over the last decade costs have doubled for health care in America — costs have doubled for government-provided health care, but everybody’s health care.  And that that meant that right now everybody knows that that wrecks budgets, it wrecks state budget, it wrecks family budgets, it wrecks federal budgets.  Every 35 cents of every dollar spent on health care is spent by the federal government or the state governments for Medicare and Medicaid — 35 cents on the dollar.  That doesn’t count veterans and other things, just those two.  And so — and what’s happened is — on the dollar, on every health care dollar.

And so we’re facing, all of us around this table, Democrat and Republicans, are facing the fact that there’s $919 billion now we’re spending on Medicare and the federal portion of Medicaid, and that if things — I don’t see any firewall is going to keep costs from doubling again, we’re going to be talking about in the year 2019 we’re going to be spending $1.7 trillion if we don’t do something to bend that curve.

A common refrain from the President and his Budget Director was “health care reform is entitlement reform.”  And through two budget cycles, when senior Administration officials were pressed on their plans for deficit reduction, they always returned to the argument that health care reform would substantially improve the federal budget outlook.

CBO Director Dr. Douglas Elmendorf has shown this argument to be incorrect.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the best and most direct presentation I have seen on the subject.  I commend Dr. Elmendorf for his honesty, clarity and bluntness.  I wish he had been this blunt and this clear in February and March before these bills became law.

Here is Dr. Elmendorf’s first slide.  Emphasis is mine.

The Challenge

Rising health costs will put tremendous pressure on the federal budget during the next few decades and beyond.  In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure.

Here he shows the effects on Medicare spending of the two new health care laws, as well as the effect if Congress permanently extends a Medicare “doctors’ fix” like the “temporary” one being considered in the House today.  The light blue line represents Medicare spending before the new laws, the dark blue line after the new laws, and the dotted line is the new laws plus a permanent doc fix.  You can see that there is net Medicare savings even with a permanent doc fix, but the unsustainable spending growth still exists.  And this is the part of the federal government where they “cut” (slowed the growth of) spending to pay for part of the new health care subsidies.

Now Dr. Elmendorf shows us the effects of the new laws on spending for Medicaid, CHIP, and the new health insurance subsidies  You can see how the new spending line (in light blue) is an enormous increase over the baseline spending in dark blue.


OK, now let’s examine the net effects of the two laws.


Since the dark blue bars are roughly the same height as the combination of the light blue bars, the net deficit effect shown by the line is right about zero.  Congressional Democratic leaders optimized to maximize coverage and minimize political pain from spending cuts and tax increases without increasing the deficit.  Had they instead focused on the the President’s stated priority of “bending the cost curve down,” this graph would have looked quite different.  The deficit reduction boasted about by the Administration and its allies is trivially small.

Dr. Elmendorf is direct:

The legislation will increase [the federal budgetary commitment to health care] by nearly $400 B during the 2010-2019 period but reduce it in the following decade.

The legislation will reduce budget deficits by about $140 billion during the 2010-2019 period and by an amount in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP during the following decade.

Q:  How can both these statements be true?  Over the next decade, how can the new laws increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care while reducing the deficit?

A:  By redirecting non-health dollars to health.  The increased Medicare payroll taxes on “the rich” are the best example.  These laws devote more federal resources to health care.  We were supposed to move the other way and devote less.

On February 23, 2009, the President said:

In the coming years, we’ll be forced to make more tough choices and do much more to address our long-term challenges, from the rising cost of health care that Peter described, which is the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far, to the long-term solvency of Social Security.

Once again Dr. Elmendorf debunks this claim that “it’s all about health cost growth.”  This graph shows that, at least for the next decade, most of the growth in federal entitlement spending is the result of aging.  Excess cost growth of health spending is a critically important but secondary factor.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/cbo-director-elmendorf-destroys-a-core-presidential-health-care-argument-2010-6#ixzz0phehPLnh

________________________ __

There are many graphs at the site but the point is that you idiots who supported ObamaCare on the premises that it was fiscally responsible were and still are fools for believing Obama and his bad of incompetent socialists and left wing hacks.  

George W Bush: "Iraq/Afghan Wars will be paid for with Iraqi Oil"


Translation: American taxpayers on the hook for 1 TRILLION DOLLARS and counting

[Fury]

Better keep spending because Bush did it. Two wrongs make a right! Meanwhile, this country will be destroyed in the process but it will have been worth it because the far-left had to one-up the last retard in the WH.

How fucking stupid does someone have to be to justify spending another trillion on something when they spend most of their time criticizing the first trillion that was spent. Does anyone else see the hypocrisy in that?

[Soul Crusher]

White House Responds To CBO's Brutal Health Care Takedown -- Claims Reform Was Never Going To Save Us
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Gus Lubin | Jun. 2, 2010, 3:18 PM | 433 |  5

________________________ ________________________ ____________________


OMB Director Peter Orszag just posted a response to a brutal fiscal analysis of health care reform by CBO Director Doug Elmendorf.

Orszag's response is conciliatory, saying the White House never said the health care reform would solve the unsustainable budget deficit -- although many think this was Obama's claim.

But Orszag's says Elmendorf underestimates the fundamental changes reform will bring:

The fact that more action must be taken on the deficit even after enactment of the Affordable Care Act, however, is a distinct question from whether the health legislation helps to improve our fiscal course — which it does.

In particular, CBO estimates that the Act will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion over the next ten years and more than $1 trillion in the ten years after that.  That’s more deficit reduction than has been enacted in over a decade.

Perhaps more importantly, the Act has the potential to fundamentally transform our health system into one that delivers better care at lower cost.  This potential isn’t fully captured in CBO’s numbers, and that’s appropriate.  CBO produces its estimates based on what has happened in the past, and we have never enacted such a fundamental transformation.

Check Out Elmendorf's Brutal Presentation Here >



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-responds-to-cbos-brutal-health-care-takedown-2010-6#ixzz0pjD3uxxx

[Soul Crusher]

Fiscal Fraud of Obamacare Snowballing Already
Townhall.com ^ | June 2, 2010 | Terry Jeffrey

Posted on Wednesday, June 02, 2010 8:59:01 AM by Kaslin

Remember the health care issue? Well, the fiscal consequences of the socialized medicine scheme enacted by President Barack Obama and Congress just two months ago are already beginning to snowball.

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, was one of the key architects and advocates of Obamacare. He was back on the House floor on Friday delivering an urgent plea to fellow Democrats that inadvertently -- or, perhaps, unavoidably -- revealed the fraudulent nature of our new national health care regime.

It was supposed to save the taxpayers money, remember?

"This legislation will lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades," Obama said when he signed the bill.

On Friday, Waxman declared that the sky is about to fall on the Medicare system. He went to the House floor to "urge" his colleagues to vote for a bill that includes $102 billion in new federal spending and would add $54 billion to the national debt over the next 10 years -- $25 billion of it in the few months remaining in this fiscal year.

Why did Waxman believe this new borrowing-and-spending was necessary?

"It's absolutely critical to do this if we are going to keep doctors in Medicare and keep the promise to Medicare beneficiaries that they will have access to physicians' services," said Waxman. "This provision will provide a moderate increase in physicians' fees, 2.2 percent for the rest of the year. If we don't act, doctors' fees will be cut by 21 percent from where they are today. This would be unconscionable."

It would not merely be unconscionable. If the 21-percent cut in Medicare fees for doctors -- that, in fact, legally took effect on June 1 -- is allowed to stand, many doctors in this country will simply stop seeing Medicare patients. They will not be able to afford it. The cost to them of serving their patients will exceed what they are paid. Their profit margin will be swept away.

To make precisely this point, 12 national surgeons' associations -- including the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons and the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery -- sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter last Wednesday warning her what would happen if Medicare doctors' fees are slashed as they are scheduled to be under current law.

"These continued payment cuts, rising practice costs and a lack of certainty going forward, make it difficult, if not impossible, for already financially challenged surgical practices to continue to treat Medicare patients," the surgeons' associations told Pelosi.

The letter pointed the speaker toward the results of a survey of more than 13,000 physicians done in February by the Surgical Coalition, a group of more than 20 medical associations. The survey asked these doctors what they would do if Medicare fees were slashed by the scheduled 21.2 percent.

Twenty-nine percent said they would opt out of the Medicare system entirely. Almost 69 percent said they would limit the number of appointments they would take from Medicare patients, 45.8 percent said they would start referring complex Medicare patients to other physicians, 45.3 percent said they would stop providing certain services, 43.8 percent said they would defer purchasing new medical equipment and 42.7 percent said they would cut their staff.

Almost 4 percent of the doctors said they would close or sell their practices.

Why did Congress plan to slash the doctors' Medicare fees in the first place? It didn't. In the past, the majority in Congress has routinely enacted budget bills that fraudulently assumed that on some future date the federal government would dramatically slash the Medicare fees paid to doctors, knowing that before that date arrived the majority would pass "emergency" legislation postponing the cuts to some still-future date. The majority in Congress does this so the long-term deficits caused by their spending bills appear to be smaller than they actually are.

As originally proposed, Obamacare would have ended this practice, permanently setting Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors at the true anticipated level. But the Congressional Budget Office determined that doing so would have added $208 billion to the cost of Obamacare over 10 years, forcing the CBO to declare that Obamacare added to the deficit rather than reduced it. That would have cost Obamacare votes on the House floor and quite possibly defeated the legislation.

So the congressional leadership stripped the "doc fix" out of Obamacare and left it to another day.

Waxman went down to the floor last Friday to declare that day had come. Unfortunately, for him, the Senate had already left town for its Memorial Day vacation. So, the current fix will have to wait until it returns.

Even then, the fix only accounts for $22.9 billion of the $102 billion cost of the bill the House did pass on Friday. Most of the rest of the money is for extending unemployment benefits and special targeted tax breaks.

The $22.9 billion fix for the doctors' fees -- if passed by the Senate -- would only last through September 2011. Then Congress will presumably do it all again -- or let the Medicare system collapse.

In the meantime, Obamacare is supposed to cut half a trillion in spending from elsewhere in Medicare, while Obama's budget -- not counting the $54 billion in new debt included in this bill -- is expected to add $9.8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.

[Skip8282]

There are many graphs at the site but the point is that you idiots who supported ObamaCare on the premises that it was fiscally responsible were and still are fools for believing Obama and his bad of incompetent socialists and left wing hacks.   

Wait until we really start feeling the impact.  Right now we're just swatting at flies.  In a couple years it's really going to have an impact.

[MCWAY]

Better keep spending because Bush did it. Two wrongs make a right! Meanwhile, this country will be destroyed in the process but it will have been worth it because the far-left had to one-up the last retard in the WH.

How fucking stupid does someone have to be to justify spending another trillion on something when they spend most of their time criticizing the first trillion that was spent. Does anyone else see the hypocrisy in that?

It's the standard liberal mantra: When in doubt, blame Bush. Liberals are blaiming Bush for the oil spill; heck, now some are blaming him for the destruction of Al Gore's marriage.

[Soul Crusher]

Notice not one of the idiots who supported obamacare like Blacken, Mons, and the biggest idiot on this site by far Straw Man have a word to say now? 

[MCWAY]

Notice not one of the idiots who supported obamacare like Blacken, Mons, and the biggest idiot on this site by far Straw Man have a word to say now? 

The premiums are going up; doctors are dropping Medicare left and right. And, employers will either pay the fines rather than insure employees (to stay fiscally afloat), or they will simply lay off people.

As usual, Obama's policies are guaranteed to do at least three things:

- They tax the very people he swears before God (and a bunch of other white folk) won't get taxed.
- They cost WAAAAAY more than he says they'll cost.
- They, of course, don't work as advertised.

[Soul Crusher]

The premiums are going up; doctors are dropping Medicare left and right. And, employers will either pay the fines rather than insure employees (to stay fiscally afloat), or they will simply lay off people.

As usual, Obama's policies are guaranteed to do at least three things:

- They tax the very people he swears before God (and a bunch of other white folk) won't get taxed.
- They cost WAAAAAY more than he says they'll cost.
- They, of course, don't work as advertised.

They are doing everything he wants - to collapse the system intentionally. 

CLOWARD & PIVEN