CBO: Democratic Health Reform Bill Produces a $6 Billion surplus

[FayeforCure]

A strong message to those who falsely claim that we cannot afford universal healthcare in the US:

For Immediate Release:
Energy & Commerce Contact: ******(202) 225-5735
Ways & Means Contact: ******(202) 225-1417
Education and Labor Contact: ****(202) 669-6874

July 17, 2009

CBO Scores Confirms Deficit Neutrality of Health Reform Bill

Washington, D.C. -- The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released estimates this evening confirming for the first time that H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, is deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window â€" and even produces a $6 billion surplus.   CBO estimated more than $550 billion in gross Medicare and Medicaid savings.  More importantly, the bill includes a comprehensive array of delivery reforms to set the stage for lowering the future growth in health care costs.

Net Medicare and Medicaid savings of $465 billion, coupled with the $583 billion revenue package reported today by the House Committee on Ways and Means, fully finance the previously estimated $1.042 trillion cost of reform, which will provide affordable health care coverage for 97% of Americans.

"This fulfills the strong commitment of the President and House leadership to enact health reform on a deficit-neutral basis," said Chairman Henry A. Waxman, Chairman Charles B. Rangel, and Chairman George Miller.  "The reforms included in this legislation will help control health care costs and expand access to quality, affordable coverage to all Americans in a fiscally-responsible manner."

The estimates also cover important reinvestments in Medicare and Medicaid, including phasing in the closing of the "donut" hole in the Medicare drug benefit.  The bill’s long-term reform of Medicare’s physician fee schedule to eliminate the potential 21 percent cut in fees, and put payments on a sustainable basis for the future, will cost about $245 billion.  Those costs, however, are not included in the net calculations above, as they will be absorbed under the upcoming statutory "pay go" legislation that is pending in the House.

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/104xx/doc10464/hr3200.pdf

[BridgeTroll]

Miraculous!

[jaxnative]

coupled with the $583 billion revenue package reported today by the House Committee on Ways and Means,

This is exactly the type of pie-in-the-sky assumptions and demagoguery that is peddled over and over again to the ignorant and the willfully ignorant.  Just repeat it enough times and....................

[BridgeTroll]

I hope they get all the bells and whistles for this plan that they want...

[jaxnative]

Not another Runaway Entitlement Program
by Jim Powell, May 27, 2009

We have had more than seven decades of experience with entitlement programs, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the first big one in 1935. Now Barack Obama is pushing another big entitlement program â€" government-run health care. We don’t need to rely on his promises, since we can reflect on our experience.

However high the current cost estimates might seem to be, actual costs will turn out to be thousands of times higher. Entitlement spending by its very nature cannot be controlled. Having determined the qualifications for participating in an entitlement program, the government is obligated to pay whoever shows up. If, as often happens, it turns out that more people than expected qualify for an entitlement program and therefore spending exceeds estimates, politically it’s almost impossible to stop.

Back in 1935, when Social Security was being debated, nobody talked about billions of dollars of unfunded liabilities. “Trillions” was beyond comprehension. Social Security generates unfunded liabilities because current Social Security payroll taxes go to pay for current benefits, and nothing is set aside to cover future benefits of current taxpayers. FDR’s smart advisors assumed that the number of taxpayers would increase as fast as the number of people collecting benefits, but the number of people collecting benefits has grown faster, and now Social Security is going broke.

Recently Social Security Trustees estimated that covering future liabilities would require $15.1 trillion to be placed in an interest-bearing account now â€" in addition to collecting Social Security payroll taxes. This $15.1trillion is bigger than the entire U.S. economy, estimated to have been $14.2 trillion in 2008. Since there’s no way of putting together such an investment portfolio for Social Security, the outlook is bleak.

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson pushed Medicare through Congress. At the time, the best guess was that it would cost $500 million a year. He thought that paying the bill would be easy, but he was wrong. By 2008, Medicare's annual outlays hit $468 billion. Medicare has a staggering $36.4 trillion of unfunded liabilities.

Economist Bruce Bartlett reported that “federal income taxes for every taxpayer would have to rise by roughly 81 percent to pay all of the benefits promised by these programs under current law over and above the payroll tax.” But the burgeoning costs of Social Security and Medicare are piled onto the payroll tax which is already the biggest tax paid by three quarters of Americans. The payroll tax destroys jobs by making it more expensive for employers to hire people. Higher payroll taxes give employers incentives to invest in machines, outsource work, move operations offshore and do anything else that might reduce headcount. Taxes on employees who remain might go up even higher.

Federal outlays for the federal-state Medicaid program have soared from less than $1 billion annually in 1966 to $339 billion in 2008, and it’s the biggest item in state budgets.
Since Obama’s government-run health care plan would flush even more money through the health care system, there would be more waste and fraud. This has been going on for years, whether Democrats or Republicans were in charge, because politicians aren’t as careful with other people’s money as they are with their own money. Medicaid paid a dentist who submitted claims for as many as 991 procedures per day. Medicare has sent millions of dollars of payments to phony medical offices. Medicare issued $4.8 billion of payments for bills that didn’t indicate a diagnosis. Some $10 billion of reimbursements for medical equipment were bogus. Medicare paid as much as $92 million to 16,500 dead doctors.

In a desperate effort to cut costs wherever possible, Obama would resort to health care rationing and degrade the quality of health care. Sometimes this means officials would classify procedures as low priority and reduce their availability, and as a consequence patients would have to wait for months. Rationing also means that government-run health insurance wouldn’t cover certain procedures or medications. Non-invasive virtual colonoscopies (CT scans of the abdomen) are reportedly on Obama’s no-no list now.

Reports of terrible government-run health care for veterans makes one even more skeptical about Obama’s plan. The Cleveland Plain Dealer cited “doctors not doing their jobs; unsupervised residents rotating in and out of the VA, leaving veterans' medical care postponed; and death rates for surgery centers that would be unacceptable at any other hospital.” The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its story about “;a vast outpouring of accounts filled with emotion and anger about the mistreatment of wounded outpatients” at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Although Walter Reed isn't a VA facility, it became clear that many similar problems occurred at VA facilities. In February 2009, the VA began notifying about 10,700 veterans that they might have been exposed to HIV or hepatitis because of unsterilized colonoscopy equipment.

Why would anybody in his right mind want to have his taxpayer money spent on government-run health care? Indeed, why would anybody want any government involvement in health care at all?

www.fff.org

[FayeforCure]

Funny how the Bush Lies on Iraq and the costs of the Medicare Drug program never are brought up here. Let's remind ourselves, shall we:

Medicare Official Testifies on Cost Figures
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: Thursday, March 25, 2004
The chief Medicare actuary, Richard S. Foster, told Congress on Wednesday that last June he provided the White House with data indicating that prescription drug legislation would cost 25 percent to 50 percent more than the Bush administration's public estimates. That information did not make its way to Congress for six more months.

Mr. Foster said he had shared his cost estimates with Doug Badger, the president's special assistant for health policy, and with James C. Capretta, associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. But he said that Thomas A. Scully, who was then administrator of the Medicare program, directed him to withhold the information from Congress, citing orders from the White House in one instance.

In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Foster said he had struggled to preserve the independence and integrity of his office. It was his first public appearance since a furor erupted over his assertions that Mr. Scully threatened to fire him if he disclosed his cost estimates to Congress during debate on the Medicare bill. The law, signed by President Bush in December, adds drug benefits to Medicare and significantly increases federal payments to private health insurers.

Mr. Foster said he had been told to withhold information from lawmakers of both parties. Moreover, he said, Mr. Scully stated that he was "acting under direct White House orders" in telling the actuary not to respond to a request from the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California. Mr. Thomas was a principal architect of the Medicare bill.
An aide to Mr. Scully sent an e-mail message to Mr. Foster on June 20 saying that the actuary would suffer "extremely severe" consequences if he provided Congress with information requested by Mr. Thomas and other lawmakers.

Mr. Thomas disclosed on Wednesday that he called Mr. Foster in June to say that the actuary should not worry about such threats.

"I supported you then," Mr. Thomas told Mr. Foster at the hearing. "I support you now."

Mr. Foster said he had evidence that Mr. Scully was indeed acting under instructions from the White House and from Mr. Badger, in particular.

"There's evidence regarding Mr. Scully's comments about acting on direct White House orders," Mr. Foster said. He refused to give details, but said he would provide them to the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, who is conducting an independent investigation.

Trent D. Duffy, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Badger did not remember telling anyone to withhold information from Congress.

Federal law says the chief actuary shall follow "professional standards of actuarial independence" and can be removed from his job "only for cause." But Mr. Foster testified that a lawyer at the department had told him that Mr. Scully had the legal right to prohibit the actuary from sharing information with Congress.

Mr. Foster identified the lawyer as Leslie V. Norwalk, acting deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. She is leading the administration's effort to carry out the new Medicare law.

William A. Pierce, a spokesman for the department, confirmed Mr. Foster's account of the conversation. "Leslie provided legal advice to Rick Foster, and we agree with her analysis," Mr. Pierce said.

Mr. Foster was calm and even-tempered in his testimony. "I did not especially want to be fired, but I was not afraid of it," he said. Last summer, he said, "I ultimately decided to resign in protest." But he added, "the staff talked me out of that."

Mr. Scully denies threatening Mr. Foster, but confirms having told him to withhold certain information from Congress.

President Bush was urging Congress to create a drug benefit under Medicare, but said the legislation could not cost more than $400 billion over 10 years, and Congress accepted that ceiling.

The shape of the legislation was continually changing, but Mr. Foster said, "The range of our estimates was $500 billion to $600 billion all the way through the process," from June to November.

In their public statements, administration officials cited lower figures. "We are spending $400 billion," Mr. Scully said in a letter to The New York Times published on Nov. 20.

In a report accompanying a 1997 law, Congress said it was imperative for the actuary to provide Congress with impartial cost estimates for legislative proposals. But Mr. Foster said Mr. Scully told him that directive "meant nothing" because it was not in the statute.

At the hearing, Democrats complained that they had been misled. Representative John Tanner, Democrat of Tennessee, said, "Every Republican and Democrat on this committee ought to be outraged at the willful, deliberate, sinister withholding" of information.

Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas, told Mr. Foster, "I wish your information had been made public at the time." But Mr. Brady said the $400 billion figure was an honest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

Mr. Foster's testimony emphasized the huge fiscal implications of the new Medicare law. The drug benefit "is expected to increase total Medicare costs by nearly one-fourth in 2006," Mr. Foster said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/25/politics/25MEDI.html?ex=1395550800&en=1494a7e538dcc639&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

But of course if it's a corporate give-away whereby government monies go to the private for profit industry, it's alright by most of you die-hard Republicans. That's called corporate welfare,.......or more accurately: corporate entitlements.

[jaxnative]

The Medicare Drug Program was a mistake and I was totally opposed to it.

Veering off course to the Iraq War, standard Bush attacks, and the demonization of the private and corporate sector contributes nothing to the subject of the discussion.

[jaxnative]

The Medicare Drug Program does though.  Just add it to the list of entitlement programs whose costs far exceed the promises of the politicians who pushed it on the taxpaying public. 

[urbanlibertarian]

Faye,
I agree completely.  Neither Republicans nor Democrats can be trusted with our tax dollars.  They will use our money to expand their own power over us and buy our votes.

That was your point, right?

[BridgeTroll]

Most of us "die hard republicans" were vehemently against the medicare drug plan... This plan was a bone thrown to the democrat side in a futile attempt to show bipartisanship.

Thank god the health care reform plan is "deficit neutral".

[BridgeTroll]

OK... It doesnt matter.  The real point is anyone who says this type of thing is deficit neutral is deluded or lying to you.  History shows it is not... it is a beast that grows ever bigger.

[BridgeTroll]

CBO: Democratic Health Reform Bill Produces a $6 Billion surplus

This IS the title of the thread...

[Ocklawaha]

I'm still laughing... Y'all that think Government Health Care is the way to go need to spend some serious time at the local VA clinic. Better yet, ANYONE that thinks the government will do a great job with health care probably loves the Postal Service. If not, y'all better get ready for USPS MEDICAL CARE. Standard GI issue, WWII surplus, cots in the hall, peanut butter shot, splint them where they lay medicine. SUCKS. REALLY SUCKS.

OCKLAWAHA
I believe we are spending ourselves rich!

[Tripoli1711]

House Democratic legislation overhauling the nation's health care system would add more than $230 billion to the federal budget deficit over the next ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper of legislation on Capitol Hill.

The $239 billion gap is identified in a report sent late Friday by CBO to House Democrats. CBO analyzed the House bill as it was brought before the Ways and Means Committee.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124791492292561969.html

This article was posted after Faye's initial post, so it seems matters may be open for some interpretation.  Let us also keep in mind that governmental estimates about the costs of entitlement programs are always drastically smaller than the actual price tag ever arrives.  Can anyone name an entitlement program that failed to exceed the estimate?  How about simply met the cost estimate?  How much more has medicare ended up costing than initially projected?

[Ocklawaha]

Having lived with a government health care system in Colombia, I noticed some flaws in an otherwise excellent medical system. Today in the USA, when someone cannot pay for a procedure, they can go to hospital and get emergency care or financial assistance. This may delay the procedure by weeks, or months, but it CAN get done and it is in the patients hands to push on the door.

In Colombia, any North American is going to get excellent health care because "wealthy Americans" can afford the highest paying socially mandated insurance programs. In contrast the poor still get basic full service health care from their own free or subsidized insurance programs. Guess who gets in first? Guess who gets to decide who lives and who dies? What happens in a tight financial year? Why is it that anyone over the age of 25 is too old to worry about? Nobody hires a 30 year old, too old, too risky, why? Government Health Care! Nothing is in the patients power to correct.

OCKLAWAHA