Repealing ‘Obamacare’ Would Explode Debt, Says Government Auditor

[kpete]

Source: Talking Points Memo

Repealing ‘Obamacare’ Would Explode Debt, Says Government Auditor

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A new report by an independent government auditor concludes that implementing President Obama’s health care law as intended will make a significant dent in the long-term debt forecast.

The report comes as Supreme Court justices weigh striking some of “Obamacare’s” central provisions — and perhaps the law in its entirety — and as the Republican Party remains committed to repealing the law if it seizes control of government in November.

“If the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is implemented as intended it would have a major effect on the (fiscal) gap but would not eliminate it,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a Monday report — a conclusion in line with its own past research and similar research conducted by other government and non-government analysts.

Read more: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/04/repealing-obamacare-would-explode-debt-government-auditor.php

[RC]

1. Then think of what Single Payer, universal Health care would do.

[center][/center]

The money saved by not paying for corporate jets, million dollar bonuses and multimillion dollar compensation for CEO's, stock holders dividends and lobbyists paying out our premium fees as bribes to our Congress critters... That money would stay in the pockets of the average citizen to be saved or more likely to be spent on something other than food and rent. Thereby helping the economy to get going again.

Naa, too simple, straight forward and honest. Can't happen here.

[Cosmocat]

5. it is insane

any medical practice has about one clerical staff per three medical staff just to manage all of the insurance nonsense - what is covered and trying to pry the payments from them.

It makes no sense at all.

Fareed Zakaria has a great piece in Time about it.

//www.fareedzakaria.com/home/Articles/Entries/2012/3/19_Health_Insurance_Is_for_Everyone.html|

[Rosa Luxemburg]

6. corporate healthcare and unecessary procedures

In the US many doctors and dentists do procedures to make money and are not necessary. How many dentists do crowns when they aren't necessary.

[Uncle Joe]

7. That's a good toon

supporting the K.I.S.S. rule.

[Fearless]

11. +10000!

[still_one]

2. and a lot of people will be hurt. That will NOT stop the supremes. It is exactly what the repukes

want. They want to destroy the economy and cause unsustainable debt, and then take power, and use that as an excuse to destroy Medicare and Social Security, which is what they have been trying to do since FDR

This country is really screwed

[freshwest]

3. +1,000. Agreed. All but the last sentence. Only if we let them.

This is going to be the most telling year yet. We have choices to make, not allow them to make them for us.

[still_one]

8. I hope your right, but I do not have that much confidence in the American people /nt

[freshwest]

9. With the presidential polls at half and half, have faith in the half that believes as you do...

Really, they are out there, in every location, but never shown on corporate media. When the media was not owned by these right wing robber barons, we had a sense that things were going to work out.

Right now we are seeing chinks in the mental walls they've set up around us and a little daylight is shining through. If SCOTUS behaves in their typical aristocratic fashion, we still have a chance to make things right.

[Bandit]

12. As long as those choices don't interfere with American Idol and Survivor and Simpsons

Our number one problem is so many Americans are completely disconnected from politics/civics....They truly don't care and feel their voice isn't heard anyway....

[freshwest]

15. Prosperous and comfortable Americans don't need anyone to hear them. They got theirs.

And they are enjoying their lives with little worry. They are largely independent of the government, or else are oblivious to corporatism, if not endorsing it.

I have a problem with the ones who are actively voting against others who they don't know. I'd say such media choices reinforce that predatory view.

But almost no one I know watches any of that stuff. TV, radio and the internet is not a part of their life, not because they can't afford it, they don't want it.

They are busy living and working and raising children, which undergirds everything. Some may see their lives as frivolous, but they have their place.

[cindyperry2010]

4. So what happened to all of the

feigned concern about the national debt? BS

[DallasNE]

10. I Carry My 22 Year Old Daughter On My Health Insurance

Repealing "Obamacare" would mean that she would instantly go on Medicaid at taxpayers expense. With her pre-existing conditions the amount is substantial. And that is just for starters. People need to stop and think before going with the knee-jerk talking point coming from people that just want more of your money by telling you what you think you want to hear.

[RitchieRich]

13. ???

Sorry, I'm confused. Do you mean that Obamacare is preventing her from being covered??

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

16. I read it the other way. PPACA allows the daughter to be carried ...

... on the parent's health insurance, up to age 26.

Repeal it, or find it unconstitutional, and the daughter can't be covered on the parent's policy.

[eyewall]

17. I didn't get that impression at all.

Just the opposite, the Affordable Care Act lets his daughter stay on his policy until she is 26. Without it she can not get health insurance because of her preexisting condition, and would thus require Medicaid coverage.

[DallasNE]

19. Exactly. n/t

.

[RitchieRich]

21. wow

I wouldn't have thought of that

[Iliyah]

14. The GOP wants the ecomony to crash

this is the reality of the insane party of greed.

[eyewall]

18. There has already been billions of tax dollars saved

by the Medicare fraud provisions in the ACA. The estimates I've seen for predicted savings range from around ten billion a year to 450 billion over ten years. Couple this reality with what Paul Krugman says in his column yesterday about Paul Ryan's "Most fraudulent budget in history" and you have blatantly obvious proof that what the GOP says they wish for is the exact opposite of what they are doing.

[Typical NYC Lib]

20. The Fascist Five Don't Care!

Nor do they care about the Constitution.

[Nancy Waterman]

22. K&R

important information

[stockholmer]

23. a couple of problems with the article

Last edited Wed Apr 4, 2012, 08:59 AM - Edit history (1)

1. The title is hyperbolic (and taken directly from a White House staffer's Tweet https://twitter.com/#!/jesseclee44/status/187204058124259328 , so much for balanced journalism from the 4th estate) : It is a 1% of GDP difference in 18 years, and this is if all of the assumptions that the White House is predicting hold true. As you will see below, even the GAO, along with the CBO and the IMF do not think they will.

"If “Obamacare” is implemented as intended, and other measures, such as automatic payment cuts to Medicare physicians, take effect, “spending on Medicare and Medicaid grows from 5 percent of GDP in 2010 to over 7 percent by 2030.”

By contrast, if Congress overrides those provisions, “[s]pending on health care grows much more rapidly under this more pessimistic set of assumptions,” according to the report. “Absent changes to these programs, spending on Medicare and Medicaid under the Alternative simulation grows to over 8 percent of GDP by 2030.”

2. From the article itself:

GAO doesn’t isolate PPACA’s stand-alone contribution to long-term budget consolidation.

Nor does the article take into account the GAO's, CBO's, and the IMF's http://blog-pfm.imf.org/pfmblog/2010/05/imf-fiscal-monitor-navigating-the-fiscal-challenges-ahead.html pessimism in regards to many of the cost containment mechanisms.

Although the GAO's report says that

“several provisions of PPACA were designed to control the growth of health care costs,”

it also notes the existence of

“significant uncertainties surrounding the growth of health care costs” and cautions that Medicare’s “Trustees, CBO, and the CMS Actuary have expressed concerns about the sustainability of certain health care cost-control measures over the long term.”

Also, from the GAO Report:

[The Trustees, CBO, and Medicare’s actuary] have also questioned whether a provision in PPACA that would restrain spending growth by reducing the payment rates for certain Medicare services based on productivity gains observed throughout the economy is sustainable over the long term. According to CMS, health care productivity gains have historically been small, and may be difficult to achieve in the future due to several factors, including the labor intensive nature of the industry and the individual customization of treatments in many cases.

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3. Some further details from Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all on how administration memos reveal the fudging of numbers:

According to a reported internal White House memo dated December 20, 2009, White House advisers had explicitly recommended to President Obama that he give up on “honest budgeting”—in particular, that he “fiddle” with the health law’s costs in order to hide its costs. The president approved the move.

In the December 20th memo, they resorted to gimmickry. In his first budget, Obama had prided himself on “honest budgeting,” declining to employ the fanciful assumptions that the previous Administration had used to hide the costs of government. On disaster relief, for example, he had estimated that the government would need twenty billion dollars a year, a figure based on the statistical likelihood of major disasters requiring federal aid. Now Obama’s aides reminded him that Congress had ignored his “ ‘honest budgeting’ approach,” and perhaps they should, too. They proposed “$5 billion per year for disaster costs.” Obama drew another check mark. The White House could also save billions by fiddling with the way it presented savings from Obama’s health-care-reform bill. Check. [bold added]

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SINGLE-PAYER is the only way out of the US's dystopian health care system.

The PPACA was always a bad idea, and a further corporatist takeover of what should considered a basic human right to universal health care.

[AndyTiedye]

24. We Didn't Have Enough Votes for Single Payer in 2009, We Have Fewer Now

Even assuming that we take back the House, which is itself a long shot,
we have twice as many seats up for re-election in the Senate as the Repigs do this year,
so the chances of gaining any seats there are small. Getting to 60 is essentially impossible
for the next two election cycles, at least.

Without a solid majority in the House, and at least 60 in the Senate, it's not happening.
The number of Republicans in either chamber who would conceivably vote for single-payer is 0.

[stockholmer]

25. agreed about the Rethugs, but this plan is deeply flawed, and the negative impacts will be hung

around the necks of Democrats everywhere if it passes Supreme Court constitutional muster (which I doubt). One of the more damning things is the disproportinate effect on small employers, who are going to be (in some cases) swamped by the combination of fines and/or expenses of compliance, as well as tax increases and money/time spent on paperwork. This will result in a large amount of lay-offs in a very large employment sector.

My heart really goes out to the US citizens who by the tens of millions, suffer the horrid blowback of it's for-profit healthcare paradigm. It is going to take a collapse of the present system in order to get universal care. At the present rate of increase, this collapse is all but baked in the cake. Medicare along, operating as it does in a straightjacket of greed by big pharma and the providers, is in a 100 trillion unfunded debt hole when projected out over the next several decades.

I bang my head so many times looking at how such a great nation is so utterly ruthless in regards to this basic human right. The fact that 75% of the US will be obese http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/02/21/429246/75-percent-of-americans-will-be-overweight-by-2020/ and 50% diabetic or near-diabetic by 2020 http://www.nationalpost.com/scripts/More+than+Americans+will+face+diabetes+2020+report/3889517/story.html makes the urgency of rectifying this even more critical.

[AndyTiedye]

26. EVERYTHING Gets Hung Around the Necks of Democrats, EVERY ELECTION

Because the Repigs own ALL the Tee Vee stations! That is why the country is constantly being dragged further and further to the right.

disproportinate effect on small employers

ACA does not require small employers (<50 employees) to offer insurance.

It is going to take a collapse of the present system in order to get universal care

It's the other way around, unfortunately. Our health care system collapsed years ago.
The backbone of our healthcare system was the city-owned hospitals.
They would take care of people even if they couldn't pay. Obviously this depended on most people having insurance of some kind, and the city having enough money to pick up the slack. That fell apart in the 80s. Many hospitals closed entirely, and private companies bought up the rest at fire-sale prices, and have been milking them for all they can.

Yet we can't just nationalize the entire health care industry. That would require a Constitutional amendment, which would be impossible to even get through Congress (2/3 majority in each house), let alone 3/4 of the states legislatures.

About the only thing we can do is to try to regulate this mess. ACA makes a start at this. More will be needed.

The fact that 75% of the US will be obese…by 2020

The linked article says "overweight or obese". Even that is not a fact, it is a prediction, since it isn't 2020 yet.

Funny how we didn't have this "obesity epidemic" in the 90s. What changed? In the 90s, we had a thriving all-ages dance culture. Raves were happening all over the country. Europe still has this. In America, it has been completely shut down in most parts of the country, with dancing largely confined to nightclubs, which are only open to those over the age of 21, and are really more about drinking than dancing anyway. In the parts of the country that still have something left of a dance scene, there is far less obesity.

Let The People Dance!