Repeal of Healthcare Reform Would Add $230 Billion to Deficit

Repeal of Healthcare Reform Would Add $230 Billion to Deficit

www.medscape.com

A House Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and related healthcare reform legislation would add $230 billion to the federal budget deficit from 2012 to 2021, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

…the agency also predicted that while premiums in the individual health insurance market would decline slightly if the ACA were repealed, many people would pay more for coverage because under the ACA, most people in this market will receive premium subsidies

(visit the link for the full news article)



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I spent 3 hours in the ER on the 15th. I just got my $11,000.00 bill in the mail.

So most people will pay more for health care insurance because there aren't any premium subsidies without the ACA.

The Democrats say the repeal will cost billions; the Republicans say the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) will increase, not reduce, the federal deficit."

I'm not sure, but the 'budget impacts' seem to hinge on the "Doc Fix." …The ACA has a provision to reduce doctors pay by 25%. If the Republicans repeal the ACA, that pay cut won't go through.

The program’s sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula for setting physician pay would have triggered a 25% pay cut on January 1 if Congress had not acted to delay it for 12 months. Replacing the SGR formula with one more favorable to physicians would cost hundreds of billions of dollars over a 10-year stretch, an amount that led Congressional Democrats to remove a doc fix provision from healthcare reform legislation in 2009 to make it more affordable.

The CBO report released today alluded to the wild-card nature of a Medicare doc fix. The agency stated that in projecting slower growth in Medicare expenditures under the ACA, it assumed the SGR formula would remain in place. A change to the SGR formula could cause the budgetary effects of the ACA repeal bill to be "quite different."

There is no reference to out-of-control hospital billing. One of the biggest problems, imho.


www.medscape.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

So is this just number play similar to the argument that extending the Tax Cut would add to the deficit?

Or, is this another liberal time bomb, with an anti-defuse mechanism?

I would like some clarification.

reply to post by sbctinfantry


The DemiRats are probably figuring they are going to clean up on lots of new tax revenue with Section 9006 of the health care bill. Of course that is if they do not completely collapse the USA instead. (over 50% of US jobs come from small business who are already hurting)

Section 9006 of the health care bill -- just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document -- mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year.

The stealth change radically alters the nature of 1099s and means businesses will have to issue millions of new tax documents each year.... money.cnn.com...

Repealing a bill that isn't even fully in effect yet is going to cost us how exactly? Malarky!

'Scuse me. The dems have increased the budget by several trillion. And they wee themselves over 23 billion a year?

Can someone explain the dichotomy here?

Originally posted by crimvelvet
reply to post by sbctinfantry

 

The DemiRats are probably figuring they are going to clean up on lots of new tax revenue with Section 9006 of the health care bill. Of course that is if they do not completely collapse the USA instead. (over 50% of US jobs come from small business who are already hurting)

Section 9006 of the health care bill -- just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document -- mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year.

The stealth change radically alters the nature of 1099s and means businesses will have to issue millions of new tax documents each year.... money.cnn.com...

Very informative, my father-in-law runs a business and I recall us having the debate over this bill. He didn't care because he would just contract out his work. Well, when they came for his contracts there was no one left to speak up for him!

I don't see how it could cost 250 billion or what ever, the program hasn't been completely financed yet?

Doesnt this assume that the bill would have without any doubt whatsoever saved that money in the first place?

Let's see, should I put my money on decades and decades of government programs costing outrageously more than they ever planned on or should I bet on this bill being the sole exception to what has become a federal rule and actually cost/save what we were told?


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Yeah, sounds fishy to me! I just don't see how any Unconstitutional program that hasn't even gone into effect would cost more money, with the financial aspect hasn't been administered.

As far as I can tell, the "saving" would have come from cutting doctors' pay by 25%. But as I said earlier, I think the real problem is out-of-control hospital billing. I could be wrong, but check this out:

I spent 3 hours in the ER on the 15th. I just got my $11,000.00 bill in the mail.

Why the surprise? The health care bill was always supposed to lower government health care costs. The same budget office said it would save close to a trillion dollars eventually, and there's almost $600 billion in projected savings to future medicare expenses in the bill. Go ahead and repeal it, blow the budget out even further and put 32 million Americans back in uninsurance land.

reply to post by mythatsabigprobe


Thats just it, by repealing the money won't be spent thus not blowing anything up ( financially ) as you claim to begin with. The money hasn't been alloted to the program as of yet.

I think the folks in D.C. use a different kind of arithmatic than we do.

Those out of control Hospital Bills are due to the fact the Hospitals are a FOR PROFIT business.
This didn't used to be, and an ordinary Blue Collar worker could afford to pay for surgeries, Tonsils, Appendixs, hernias, etc out of his own pocket without any kind of financial hardship. That was before all the so-called Health Insurance scams came about.
Looks like a "feeder" business to me.

How can the birth of any Bureaucracy save any money whatsoever. Just look to any government run institution, social security, medicare/medicaid, even the BMV/DMV (depending on where you live) has more red tape just to track who owns what car and give out little plastic card to ID you or let you drive.

I am not saying private health insurance is perfect by any means but do you want someone like the clerk at the BMV to have any say in your healthcare, I think not. At least the insurance companies agenda is quite clear what is the government's who is not suppose to make a profit?

Being retired military, I will drop in my two cents on quasi-government run healthcare.

Using Tricare, in order to see a doctor, I would have to call a hotline. 1800TRICARE

That links me to my regional tricare office, as there are multiple regions, there are multiple numbers.

When the call connects, I am given a touch-tone question as to which medical facility I am calling about in regards to whatever services needed. I press the button to select, and immediately I am transferred to an operator (about 4 seconds) who asks me which medical facility I am calling about in regards to whatever services needed. I basically repeat the answer that I had dialed, and yes, that person collects a government salary and that is all they do. If you for some reason dialed the wrong number, and couldn't manage to hang up and try again, you have this gem of a person to transfer you.

Once I arrive on hold, depending on what time of day, I will remain on hold for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. Generally, I will be informed by the operator at that time that my service needs can only be partially met and I will have to be transferred one or more times to different departments to meet my needs.

Now that I have scheduled an appointment, more than likely a month or so farther in the future than I needed it, I wait.

I arrive at the hospital to recieve my visit or treatment and generally wait 15 minutes to an hour past my scheduled appointment time. Had I showed up late at all, I would be written in as a no-show and could possibly bear the entire cost of the visit. Generally speaking I am rescheduled, another month in the future, more often than that.

Once I see the doctor, due to his backlog, he is incredibly rushed and does a sub-par job at best. He doesn't take the time to reference my medical records, and orders redundant tests and imaging. (Yes this has all happened to me countless times, I've had so many X-Rays I can't have another for about two years, whatever that means.) He generally prescribes a slew of medications and promises to send referrals.

If the referrals make it from point A to point B, and are not forgotten, I now have the obligation to call and schedule with the referred doctor. None of this is done by the doctor. That means repeating this process from the start again, except the wait time for referral doctors in specialties such as orthopedics is somewhere between two and four months.

Before I see this specialist, I will recieve a "bill" that states it is not a bill. It itemizes what the hospital charged the insurance, and then almost as if to gloat, the insurance states what it decides that treatment/image/visit is worth. It only pays what it believes is the worth and then zeroes out the charges. Example :

XRAY
Hospital Charge - 250.00
Tricare Allowed - 25.00
Tricare Payed - 25.00
You Owe - 0.00

They literally screw over the hospital with numbers that obscenely low. That is why no one accepts Tricare, that is why it takes a month to see a doctor (no one will work for that money when they can earn about 1,000% more in the private sector), and that is why no one is ever taken care of.

Don't get me started on surgery. I was literally told by my doctor I needed back surgery but they couldn't justify the cost.

reply to post by sbctinfantry


Yuuup. You definitely "get what you pay for" when it comes to TRICARE and other gov't ran "medical" centers...

Not to mention how the feds keep the states in fiscal shackles due to Medicare/Medicaid funding; or the threat of taking it away! The states can't even hope to balance their budgets and still pay for Medicare/caid while waiting for that gov't reimbursement....

reply to post by soficrow


Get rid of insurance middlemen and there would be no lack of health care nor affordability. But neither party wants to do that. I mean the mighty dollar and profit is more important than peoples lives.

I am all for entertaining the idea that that CBO has suddenly become partisan and is just making things up but all I see are people using the usualy Obama hate to dismiss things out of hand. Any detractors have a rebuttal to the CBO findings?
CBO letter to Boehner

reply to post by Sinnthia


In light of this CBO fear-mongering we have this breaking Health Care news:

Here and here. Health Care repeal set for House, next week.

Stay tuned imo... I'm positive the anxiety level will be nicely retched up on Health Care (at least until "the" trail..); should be fun to watch how this number might change from the CBO... kind of like it did with the cost of Health Care Reform (only AFTER it was passed!)