Posted on 08/20/2009 8:28:10 AM PDT by milwguy
HEALTH CARE’S silly season is upon us. If we can be sure of anything, it is that President Barack Obama and his congressional allies will do whatever they can to hide the cost of their health plan. Lucky for them, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, has shown the way.
In 2006, Romney enacted a health-reform package strikingly similar to what Democrats are pushing through Congress, including individual and employer mandates, private health-insurance subsidies, broader Medicaid eligibility and a new health-insurance “exchange.” Lately, Massachusetts officials have been forced to raise taxes and cancel some residents’ coverage to pay for it all. Local headlines are decrying “the forbidding arithmetic of health-care reform.”
Supporters at the Massachusetts Taxpayer Foundation say the cost isn’t nearly as high as many people think. A recent foundation report claims that “The cost of this achievement has been relatively modest and well within early projections of how much the state would have to spend to implement reform.”
(Excerpt) Read more at projo.com ...
In The Boston Globe, foundation president Michael J. Widmer writes, “Between fiscal 2006 and 2010, the annual incremental cost from the state budget is less than $100 million, a modest sum for this historic achievement.” Widmer was kind enough to walk me through his organization’s estimates. As it turns out, there’s more than just a little sleight of hand involved.
First, the “annual incremental cost” — $88 million — is not the total amount that the law added to the state budget each year, but the average increase from one year to the next. In other words, the total “cost from the state budget” in 2009 is not $88 million but three times that ($264 million).
Second, that average “incremental cost” assumes the state will cut payments to safety-net hospitals by $200 million next year. We’ll see about that. Safety-net hospitals are already suing the state for more money. Set aside those assumed savings, and the cumulative “cost from the state budget” for 2009 is actually $408 million.
But the larger problem is that the “cost from the state budget” ignores 80 percent of the total cost of RomneyCare. As Widmer explains, state officials only have to scrape up about 20 percent of total new spending themselves. The federal government — which is to say, taxpayers in other states — kicks in another 20 percent through the Medicaid program.
The remaining 60 percent appears in no government budget. It is new “private” spending that individuals and employers must undertake according to the law’s dictates. That brings the total cost of RomneyCare to at least $2.1 billion in 2009.
Both Widmer and his organization’s report do mention that the law spurred employers to spend an additional $750 million on employee health coverage. But that only accounts for about two-thirds of new private spending. Moreover, they describe that mandated private spending as a benefit of the law, rather than a cost.
Instead of a bargain, RomneyCare is therefore far costlier than conventional wisdom suggests. Beacon Hill is eliminating health coverage for 30,000 legal immigrants, and contemplating a sweeping overhaul of how medical care is purchased, organized, and delivered, just to cope with one-fifth of the law’s cost.
Neither is RomneyCare terribly cost-effective. The law covered an estimated 432,000 previously uninsured residents in 2009. That means Massachusetts is covering the uninsured at a cost of about $6,700 per person, or $27,000 for a family of four. The average nationwide cost of an individual policy ($2,600 in 2007) and an employer-sponsored family policy ($12,700 in 2008) are fractions of those figures.
RomneyCare demonstrates how hard it will be for Congress to scrape up even 20 percent of the cost of the Democrats’ health plans. The Massachusetts experience also counsels that when Democrats produce a health plan that costs a mere $1.5 trillion, the actual cost will be even higher.
Michael F. Cannon is director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute and co-author of Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It.
Goog gumdrops Batman, that doesn't sound like "savings" to me.
The lies are being uncovered daily.
And people want to make Romney the standard bearer for the GOP? What are they smoking?
The lies may have been exposed, but don’t expect widespread MEDIA coverage!
In all fairness to Romney the Mass lege changed his bill, then passed the changed one he vetoed that bill but was over ridden
so the current mass disaster is NOT Romney’s bill
yes he did sign it. However he was over ridden and he did veto the changes the lege made. The lege also over rode his veto
“But Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state and candidate to be Republican National Committee chairman, said the Democratic “regime” in Massachusetts is to blame since the Legislature changed the plan that Romney originally put on the table. Romney vetoed a number of those changes when he was governor, but the General Assembly overrode him. “
do some research and learn
the “conservative’s conservative” lol
Um ... wrong.
That excuse has been discredited by Mitt himself. He's given the plan an A(?!) calling it, in its CURRENT form, his greatest achievement and proudly highlights it in his recently commissioned $30,000 portrait:
The portrait depicts the governor seated at the front edge of his desk wearing his trademark business suit. Beside him is a small framed photo of his wife, Ann, and ... [wait for it] ... a copy of the health care reform law he called his greatest achievement.
nice deflection
why not admit the facts as I posted?
1.the mass lege changed Romney’s bill?
2. Romney vetoed the lege passed bills?
3. The lege over rode Romney’s veto?
link please
just yesterday Romney was interviewed on this and he outlined exactly what happened
Are YOU saying the lege didn’t change his bill
are you saying Romeny didn’t veto it?
Are you saying the lege didn’t over ride Romeny’s veto?
So you are saying the facts as I posted are true but because they don’t fit your agenda you discount them
fine’
but those are the facts
For non-MA residents reading the thread, the laughably called "Massachusetts Taxpayer Foundation" never met a tax or a tax increase or a tax increase thinly disguised as a fee increase that it didn't salivate over.
Actual MA taxpayers find their interests better represented by Citizens for Limited Taxation.
Richard Whitney's portrait of Mitt Romney
oh he's a sly one that Mitt (but FR is not fooled).
Where in that link does it say the lege didn’t change the healthcare bill Romney sent them?
Where does it say Romeny did NOT veto the passed bill?
Where does it say the legel over rode romeny’s veto?
Facts, where are your facts?
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