http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110107...lYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDY2JvaGVhbHRoY2Fy CBO: Health care repeal would increase deficit WASHINGTON â Repealing President Barack Obama's landmark health care overhaul would add billions to government red ink and leave millions without coverage, Congress' nonpartisan budget referees said Thursday ahead of a politically charged vote in the House. House Speaker John Boehner brushed off the Congressional Budget Office analysis as emboldened Republicans, now in the majority in the House, issued their own report arguing that Obama's coverage expansion would cost jobs and increase budget deficits. But Democrats seized on the CBO analysis, calling it a game changer in the battle for public opinion. In a letter to Boehner, budget office director Douglas Elmendorf estimated repeal would increase the deficit by $230 billion from 2012 to 2021, the 10-year estimating period for budget projections. Moreover, Elmendorf said about 32 million more people would be uninsured in 2019 as a consequence. But Boehner told reporters: "I do not believe that repealing the job-killing health care law will increase the deficit." The budget experts are "entitled to their opinion," added Boehner, R-Ohio, saying that the analysts had to rely on information selectively supplied by Democrats who wrote the legislation. Not so, said the Democrats; adverse rulings by the budget office repeatedly forced them to go back and revise the bill as they were writing it. The budget director's verdict gave Democrats a new counterattack against Republicans elected on a promise to cut government debt. Until now, the main Democratic argument has been that repealing the law would eliminate benefits people are already receiving, from seniors facing high drug costs, to young adults who can stay on their parents' coverage, to those in poor health who can now get insurance. "We can't afford to increase the deficit by nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, especially with the very first substantive vote of the 112th Congress," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., one of the authors of the law. "Republicans have to understand that health care isn't going to be repealed," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "They should get a new lease on life and talk about something else." Reid has said he'll block repeal in the Democratic-led Senate. The White House issued a formal veto threat, saying the repeal bill "would explode the deficit, raise costs for the American people and businesses, deny an estimated 32 million people health insurance, and take us back to the days when insurers could deny, limit or drop coverage for any American." Republicans countered that even if it's technically accurate that the health care law reduces deficits in the short run, a program that big is bound to bust the budget over the long term â and repealing it now will save money later. "Washington, D.C. may be the only place in the country where people believe that not spending $1 trillion and not massively expanding the size and scope of government health care will increase the deficit," said Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. House Republicans have named their legislation the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," and they released a report Thursday to make their case. It challenged economic studies that have portrayed the law in a favorable light, and offered evidence from competing studies that forecast job loss and higher costs. The National Federation of Independent Business, for example, is projecting that the law could lead to the elimination of 1.6 million jobs. NFIB is suing to have the legislation declared unconstitutional. But the House GOP report raised some questions of its own. Using a partial quote from a Congressional Budget Office study, the Republican report suggested that the nonpartisan office agreed that the law will cause significant job losses. In fact, what the CBO actually said was that the law will "reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by a small amount." In the Republican report "small amount" was replaced by an ellipsis. And CBO said most of that would come not from employers cutting jobs, but from people deciding they don't need to work as much because they can get health insurance more easily. George Mason University health economist Len Nichols said that Republicans were trying to compare apples to oranges. "The CBO report is about people willingly withdrawing their labor," he said. "That is quite different from jobs that employers offer workers." The House has scheduled a procedural vote on repeal Friday, with final action next week. Polls show that Americans remain divided over the health care law, but there's no clear mandate for repeal either. An Associated Press-GfK survey in November found those favoring repeal were outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 by those who said the law should be left as it is, or changed to do more.
The CBO has no credibility. Not so long ago they were saying that Obamacare was going to increase the deficit. http://centristnetblog.com/daily/cb...09-billion-in-deficit-spending-over-10-years/ Where can I find a job that I can be soooooo inaccurate and still be paid an excellent wage?! Oh, wait...the Republicraps are challenging the "savings"... http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs...ew-cbo-estimate-repealing-obamacare-will-rais Trust neither Dumbacraps nor Republicraps! They only seem to want the status quo and do not want to face the real deficit and trade problems facing the US! -gastropod
Yes, that's true, but if you understood how the CBO calculates their assessments you would understand why. The CBO HAS to calculate their assessment based on what they are given, so if what they are given is wrong the CBO assessment is wrong. To dumb it down, if I tell you the amount that medicaid is reimbursed will fall by 100%, although it's a flat out lie, the CBO's assessment will reflect not the truth but the lie that reimbursements will fall by 100% and that's how they come up with their numbers. In short, the democrats numbers are crap and everyone knows it. Except you of course.
Just so we're clear, repealing what will unavoidably be yet another behemoth, mind numbingly wasteful, inept, federal bureaucracy will "increase" the deficit? IOW spending LESS money will "increase" the deficit? Is there anyone on this planet naive enough to believe this?
I am literally laughing out loud at anyone who thinks a government program will lower the deficit over time. For anyone who thinks this way i would love for them to kindly point me to all of the successful government programs we are currently running which are profitable......
I recently saw where at least 20% or 1 in 5 federal programs are NOT achieving their original goal. IOW they could be eliminated tomorrow and except for some useless federal employees no one would even notice.
I dont want to reject this notion or anything, but im pretty sure i can go out on a limb and say that not only do 20% of programs fail..... I can take it a step further and say that 100% of government programs fail..... the evidence is overwhelming, we would be far better off with zero intervention.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/health-reform-without-a-public-plan-the-german-model/ Health Reform Without a Public Plan: The German Model By UWE E. REINHARDT Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton. In the previous two posts, I sought to explain why the public health insurance plan that Barack Obama had firmly promised during the presidential campaign appears to have become a deal-breaker in President Obamaâs quest to sign a genuinely bipartisan health reform bill later this year. What if that plan were sacrificed on the altar of bipartisanship? Would it be the end of meaningful health reform? Not necessarily, if the health systems of the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland are any guide. None of these countries uses a government-run, Medicare-like health insurance plan. They all rely on purely private, nonprofit or for-profit insurers that are goaded by tight regulation to work toward socially desired ends. And they do so at average per-capita health-care costs far below those of the United States â costs in Germany and the Netherlands are less than half of those here. To see how this can work, think of the basic functions that any health system must perform. To wit: 1. the financing of health care, that is, the extraction of the required funds from individuals and households who ultimately pay for 100 percent of all health care 2. the pooling of individual risks with the aim of protecting individuals and households from the high costs of medical care in case of illness 3. the purchasing of health care from its providers (doctors, hospitals, drug companies, etc.) 4. the production of health care goods and services 5. the regulation of the entire system so that it operates towards socially desired ends. Who should perform these functions is powerfully driven by the distributive social ethic that nations wish to impose upon their health systems. In Europe, as in Canada, that social ethic is based on the principle of social solidarity. It means that health care should be financed by individuals on the basis of their ability to pay, but should be available to all who need it on roughly equal terms. The regulations imposed on health care in these countries are rooted in this overarching principle. First, these countries all mandate the individual to be insured for a basic package of health care benefits. Many Americans oppose such a mandate as an infringement of their personal rights, all the while believing that they have a perfect right to highly expensive, critically needed health care, even when they cannot pay for it.