Posted on 11/15/2012 7:02:03 AM PST by SeekAndFind
If one wanted to sum up the consequences of the entire 2012 election in a single issue, look no farther than Obamacare.
The new health-care law is generally regarded as the signature achievement of the president’s first term. It’s certainly emblematic of Obama’s entire approach to government and what we can expect from his second-term initiatives.
The president promised a great deal of benefits from health-care reform: lower premiums, better care, universal coverage. He reassured Americans: If you had health insurance, and you liked it, you could keep it. The bill’s gross ten-year cost would be less than $1 trillion, and the legislation would actually reduce the deficit in the long run. The rich and some big businesses might have to pay a bit more in taxes, but the middle class would be better off.
But as with so many other policies of this administration, the results never matched the rhetoric. The pretty promises turned out to be “just words.”
Rather than work across the aisle, President Obama pushed his bill through on a purely partisan basis, using dubious parliamentary maneuvers and refusing to consider Republican alternatives. Nor was the president deterred by public opinion. Polls consistently showed that Americans opposed the president’s plan — they still do — but the president insisted on doing it his way.
The president who always prefers government to markets unsurprisingly produced a costly new entitlement program, financed by both new taxes and massive debt, that relies on top-down planning. The $1 trillion price tag has been left far behind. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will now cost at least $1.8 trillion through 2022, and other estimates suggest it could cost as much as $2.2 trillion over that period if all costs are taken into account, adding more than $823 billion to the deficit over ten years.
Even the government’s own actuaries expect it to drive up insurance premiums. The most recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services estimates that in the future premiums will rise at 7.9 percent annually, double the rate they would have risen if Obamacare had not been passed.
Many of Obamacare’s taxes fall not just on the rich, but on the middle class and small businesses. In fact, the mandate “tax” in particular will hit 11 million middle-class taxpayers to the tune of $6 billion. Moreover, the law’s costly new mandates and regulations are widely seen as a small-business job killer.
And, while Obamacare doesn’t directly ration care, it puts in place structures that will almost inevitably lead to rationing. Notably, beginning in 2017, a board of 15 unelected bureaucrats, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), will have the authority to impose drastic cuts to physician reimbursements under Medicare. If abused, this authority could allow the government to refuse to pay for some treatments or providers, effectively rationing care. Even under the best of scenarios, the already-planned cuts will force as many as 15 percent of hospitals to close and cause many doctors to stop seeing Medicare patients. Given Medicare’s enormous unfunded liabilities, some reduction in benefits is inevitable, but it is typical of the Obama administration to prefer that bureaucrats rather than individual consumers decide how that reduction takes place.
In addition, millions of Americans are discovering that they will not be able to keep their current health-care plans. This includes seniors who will lose their Medicare Advantage plans, and businesses and individuals who find their plans non-compliant with Obamacare’s required benefits (such as Catholic charities and schools that are now required to offer birth control, including abortifacients). Surveys suggest that 10 to 30 percent of employers could drop their coverage, dumping their workers into plans offered on the government-run exchanges.
Yet, for all this, Obamacare falls far short of its goal of universal coverage. Nearly 20 million Americans will still be uninsured after the bill is fully implemented. Millions more will simply be dumped into Medicaid.
A President Romney could have used waivers, executive orders, and his power over budgets to delay or cut back on parts of the law.
Thus, on health care, as on so many other issues, last Tuesday’s election left us with a president whose belief in big government and centralized control has been and will only continue to be a disaster. The 2012 election has delivered us a devil we know all too well.
— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.
Doesn't that sound like the Canadian system? Isn't that what liberals want, a universal, national health care system?
“The new health-care law is generally regarded as the signature achievement of the president’s first term.”
The government now has full ownership of our physical beings. Amazingly, morons are out there celebrating being enslaved by the first black president.
This was my original response when the legislation was still pendiing and for the most part it is still valid today:
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When this “health care for all” crap passes, right now the legislation states that it will be illegal to sell private policies over the date of passage. It also says that HSA’s will no longer be allowed. That means that my current policy will no longer be allowed and neither I nor my employer will be allowed to privately purchase an alternative.
I will not accept the “public option” that I will be dictated to join. I will not give the government control over my physical body. I will not pay their fines, I will not surrender to the impending warrant for my arrest. When they knock on my door, I will not answer. When they kick it in, I will make the news.
How’s that for unification, libtards? You loons are currently legislating my death. I will chose the terms and I will bring as many of you along as possible!
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“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security”
my plan is no “health care”. I will have insurance, as I do, I just will not partake of medical services unless injured. Just injury insurance, stitches broken bones. Otherwise if I get sick I am gonna let it take its course. If I die, so be it.
Liberal pograms do not fail—they just need more money and more time. /s
“Will they conclude that government should stay out of the health care field?”
Quite the contrary. The genius of Obamacare is that it inextricably mixes government and the private sector. Every failure will be blamed on “greedy” “profit-making” private insurers, drug companies, medical device manufacturers etc. while government will take credit for every success (e.g., reducing the number of uninsured). Every “problem” identified will be accompanied by a demand that government fix that problem. Thus, like the tar baby, the government will become ever deeply entangled in health care. Progressives are hoping things get broken enough that they can usher in single payer health care as the solution to the “failed” private market.
SS and Medicare now represent a $60 trillion unfunded liability
Ridiculous
If you have your health, why, you have got everything.
He who provides and consumes the health care decides nothing. He who pays for the health care decides everything.
Bend, Oregon America!
If Americans and their elected continue to allow the United States Constitution to be abused, misused, and trashed then we deserve what we get. I suggest we all hammer our elected with the admonition they follow the Constitution and quit bending the laws to suit others and themselves. We would not be whining about Obamacare had we all protected the U.S. Constitution......don’t be bullied by those who abuse our Constitution...that document protects us all...
I believe you're absolutely right. And, I believe that Obamacare will, like Medicare, develop its own constituency of voters. I suspect that future GOP candidates will be advocating "improvements" rather than repeal. In fact, isn't that what Romney did this year with his promise to "save" Medicare and his promise to "repeal and replace" Obamacare? How many candidates out there (at any level of government) are advocating that government get out of the health care system entirely?
Did you read where it said that was at a point in time while the legislation was only being discussed? Yes, many of the details of the actual legislation changed. My sentiment did not!
“I will not pay their fines, I will not surrender to the impending warrant for my arrest. When they knock on my door, I will not answer. When they kick it in, I will make the news.”
Probably not how it will happen.
You fail to pay the fine, they won’t issue you a tax refund. If you have no tax refund, they will continue to send letters, and fines, over the years until it gets big enough for them to take directly from your bank account. No bank accounts, no refunds, then they will have your employer garnish your paycheck.
No paycheck, then ultimately they might take your property, but it will be a long, long time. And by then there will be a single payer, unionized health care system.
Fraud notwithstanding, that national poll we took on November 6 says otherwise.
Ridiculous my butt. If you think that Obamacare is really going to reduce Medicare costs, you are smoking something. Medicare Part A has been running in the red since 2008. The shortfall is being made up using the IOUs in the HI Trust fund. These IOUs are being redeemed by the General Fund. Since we borrow 42 cents of every federal dollar spent is borrowed, we are adding to the national debt.
By law, 75% of the costs of Medicare Parts B and D are funded by the General Fund. The premiums only pay for 25% of the costs. In the 2012 Trustees Report $222 billion came from the General Fund in 2011 for SMI (Medicare Parts B and D) and $87.8 billion for Medicare Part A. These costs will continue to increase as the population ages and healthcare costs increase faster than inflation. People who look at the actuarial soundness of Medicare assume that the USG will continue to fund 75% of SMI from the General Fund. Medicare is consuming about 15% of the non-Medicare portion of the federal budget and if not reformed will consume the entire federal budget.
Obamacare may be the law, but it has not been fully implemented with all of the projected tax revenue. From the Trustees:
Also, as described in the Medicare Trustees Report, the projections for HI and SMI Part B depend significantly on the long-range feasibility of the various cost-saving measures in the Affordable Care Act�in particular, the lower increases in Medicare payment rates to most categories of health care providers. For such efforts to be successful in the long range, providers will have to generate and sustain unprecedented levels of productivity gains or other improvements in efficiency."
"Concern about the long-range financial outlook for Medicare and Social Security often focuses on the exhaustion dates for the HI and OASDI trust funds—the time when projected trust fund balances under current law would be insufficient to pay the full amounts of scheduled benefits. A more immediate issue is the growing burden that the programs will place on the Federal budget well before exhaustion of the trust funds.
Chart D shows the excess of scheduled outgo over dedicated tax and premium income for the OASDI, HI, and SMI trust funds expressed as percentages of GDP. Each of these trust funds’ operations will exert rapidly rising pressure on the Federal budget in future years. General revenues pay for roughly 75 percent of all SMI costs. From now through 2024, interest earnings and asset redemptions, financed from general revenues, will cover the shortfall of HI tax and premium revenues relative to expenditures. In addition, general revenues must cover similar payments as a result of growing OASDI deficits through 2033.
In 2012, the projected difference between Social Security’s dedicated tax income and expenditures is $165 billion. For HI, the projected difference between dedicated tax and premium income and expenditures is $38 billion. The projected general revenue demands of SMI are $217 billion. Thus, the total general funds for Social Security and Medicare in 2012 are $420 billion, or 2.7 percent of GDP. Redemption of trust fund bonds, interest paid on those bonds, and transfers from the general funds provide no new net income to the Treasury, which must finance these payments through some combination of increased taxation, reductions in other government spending, or additional borrowing from the public.
Chart D shows that the difference between cost and revenue from dedicated payroll taxes, income taxation of benefits, and premiums will grow rapidly through the 2030s as the baby-boom generation reaches retirement age. This imbalance would result in vastly increased pressure on the Federal budget if the law were changed to maintain scheduled benefits in the absence of an increase in dedicated tax revenues, with such financing requirements equaling 4.8 percent of GDP by 2040.
The bottom line is that the $60 trillion is probably understated in terms of the total federal budget. And the imputed impact of Obamacare on reduced payments to hospitals and doctors may well be ephemeral in much the same way as the "Doc fix" that must be implemented every year to waive the reduction in physician payments under Medicare.
Medicare beneficiaries receive three times more in benefits than they pay into the system. How can you sustain such a system?
This graph shows that the average man and woman (average defined in the study as average income over their working lives and living to the average life expectancy) who start receiving benefits in 2010 get over 3 times more in benefits than they pay in to the system! Of importance, the study accounts for inflation by calculating all past taxes and future payments in 2010 dollars to provide an accurate comparison.
If the notion that Medicare recipients are simply "getting back what they paid in" is false then where is the money coming from? Simply, the excess received is being borrowed from younger generations and the cost is more than we can bear.
By 2015, major barricades and roadchecks will be standard for all thoroughfares, US troops will be tasked to quell riotous behaviour across the Homeland. Finding a doctor much less a competent one will be nigh impossible. Voting will be mandatory, even for the newly amnestied, never mind they know nothing about this nation except its rulers&overlords are cutthroat..
You want upheaval, Libs, you got it. bring your band-aids and your bongs. leave the photo ID at home. it won’t matter, face recognition software will peg your identity a mile away.
just a prediction..
I'm sure you meant 'programs' ... or did you? :^)
kabar, you put a lot of effort into that post and I appreciate it. However what was ridiculous was representing Wolf’s comment as saying the $60 trillion is solely SS and Medicare. It’s not. And Wolf using old numbers because he thinks it helps his cause is disingenuous.
Also they are not liabilities as they can be changed by congress at anytime. But that one’s more of a semantic disagreement.
Of course something needs to be done to reign in healthcare costs. Obamacare is what we have to deal with right now. I still don’t understand why Republicans hate it since it’s basically a Heritage Foundation plan. I would have been much happier with a true single-payer system and the ability to control prescription drug prices.
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