You two should get a room, or just go SoLo.
TIA JMHO FWIW
moon1 :142slap:
oke :jerkit:Health Insurance Cost
- Thread starter kcwolf
- Start date
You two should get a room, or just go SoLo.
TIA JMHO FWIW
moon1 :142slap:
oke :jerkit:
The Cost of Health Insurance Premiums could DOUBLE by 2020
The Cost of Health Insurance Premiums could DOUBLE by 2020
Without health care reform, health insurance premiums could almost double by 2020, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a 90-year-old non-profit health care charity.
According to "Paying the Price: How Health Insurance Premiums Are Eating Up Middle-Class Incomes," employer-sponsored family plans will rise from an average cost of $12,298 in 2008 to $23,842 in 2020 (the same coverage would have cost close to $9,200 in 2003) if health-care costs continue to rise at the current rate.
With health spending projected to double if we stay on our current path, middle and lower income families are at high risk of losing their coverage or facing long-term stagnant incomes. Employers and employees share premium costs, but we know that take-home pay and retirement savings are being sacrificed to maintain health benefits. Reforms that slow the growth of health-care costs could go a long way toward health and financial stability for working families.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Con...miums-Are-Eating-Up-Middle-Class-Incomes.aspx
The Cost of Health Insurance Premiums could DOUBLE by 2020
Without health care reform, health insurance premiums could almost double by 2020, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a 90-year-old non-profit health care charity.
According to "Paying the Price: How Health Insurance Premiums Are Eating Up Middle-Class Incomes," employer-sponsored family plans will rise from an average cost of $12,298 in 2008 to $23,842 in 2020 (the same coverage would have cost close to $9,200 in 2003) if health-care costs continue to rise at the current rate.
With health spending projected to double if we stay on our current path, middle and lower income families are at high risk of losing their coverage or facing long-term stagnant incomes. Employers and employees share premium costs, but we know that take-home pay and retirement savings are being sacrificed to maintain health benefits. Reforms that slow the growth of health-care costs could go a long way toward health and financial stability for working families.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Con...miums-Are-Eating-Up-Middle-Class-Incomes.aspx
The 47 million figure comes straight from the U.S. Census Bureau. Various analyses have tried to decipher just who the uninsured are. These are the main conclusions, with the caveat that there is overlap in these numbers:
THE WORKING POOR - The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that about two-thirds of the uninsured ? 30 million people ? earn less than twice the poverty level, or about $44,000 for a family of four. It also estimates that more than 80 percent of the uninsured come from families with full-time or part-time workers. They often cannot get coverage at work or find it too expensive to buy. They surely deserve a helping hand.
THE BETTER OFF - About 9 million uninsured people, according to census data, come from households with incomes of $75,000 or more. Critics say that is plenty of money for them to buy their own insurance. But many of these people live in ?households? that are groups of low-wage roommates or extended families living together. Their combined incomes may reach $75,000, but they cannot pool their resources to buy an insurance policy to cover the whole group.
Still, about 4.7 million uninsured people live in families that earn four times the poverty level ? or $88,000 for a family of four ? the dividing line that many experts use to define who can afford to buy their own insurance.
Those people who could afford coverage but choose not to buy it ought to be compelled to join the system to lessen the possibility that a serious accident or illness might turn them into charity cases and to help subsidize the coverage of poorer and sicker Americans.
YOUNG ADULTS - Some 13 million young adults between the ages of 19 and 29 lack coverage. These are not, for the most part, healthy young professionals making a sensible decision to pay their own minimal medical bills rather than buy insurance that they are unlikely to need. The Kaiser foundation estimates that only 10 percent are college graduates, and only 5 percent have incomes above $60,000 a year, while half have family incomes below $16,000 a year. Many of these younger people would be helped by reform bills that would provide subsidized coverage for the poor and an exchange where individuals can buy cheaper insurance than is now available.
ALREADY ELIGIBLE - Some 11 million of the poorest people, mostly low-income children and their parents, are thought to be eligible for public insurance programs but have failed to enroll, either because they do not know they are eligible or are intimidated by the application process. When such people arrive at an emergency room, they are usually enrolled in Medicaid, but meanwhile they have lost out on routine care that could have kept them out of the emergency room. They will presumably be scooped up by the mandate under reform bills that everyone obtain health insurance.
THE UNDERINSURED - The Commonwealth Fund estimates that 25 million Americans who had health insurance in 2007 had woefully inadequate policies with high deductibles and restrictions that stuck them with large amounts of uncovered expenses. Many postponed needed treatments or went into debt to pay medical bills.
NON-CITIZENS - Some 9.7 million of the uninsured are not citizens; of those, more than 6 million may be illegal immigrants, according to informed estimates. None of the pending bills would cover them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23sun1.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
Wow. it's really too bad your not that dead soldier so we could call your grieving family a bunch of lairs and spoiled selfish people who want to push their silver platter agenda. Wow too bad I didn't serve with you, you would have been fragged by my own hands.:thefinger
Skelnik....LMAO
Skelnik....LMAO
U will never get anySUBSTANCE out of this Trampled Underfoot....LMAO.... when he cant make a point, he calls you names. But he NEVER and I mean NEVER has and logic to bring to the table. He will call you an idiot or scumbag or something but that is when you know you have him beaten because he has no logic or substance to bring to the table other than words. His words become so nasty that he should have spent many of times out in the woodshed.
Skelnik....LMAO
U will never get anySUBSTANCE out of this Trampled Underfoot....LMAO.... when he cant make a point, he calls you names. But he NEVER and I mean NEVER has and logic to bring to the table. He will call you an idiot or scumbag or something but that is when you know you have him beaten because he has no logic or substance to bring to the table other than words. His words become so nasty that he should have spent many of times out in the woodshed.
Its getting hard to determine fact from fiction of these tear jerking examples on healthcare reform--only one common denominator--if Gumby's telling the story you know its a lie.
Obama said that a surgeon makes $30,000 to $50,000 to amputate the foot of a diabetic, while receiving a pittance to prevent the diabetes that necessitated the procedure in the first place.
Fact of the matter-Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and $1,140 for a leg amputation," said ACS
--also have most recent where he tried to dupe the sheep into believing Ins Co declined payment because she was treated for acne--he failed to mention heart condition and lying about weight--
Heres a few additional cons-fibs-stretched truths and out right lies from the grifter-- sources and references provided in article-
You Mislead!
Fact-checking Obama.
By Michael F. Cannon and Ramesh Ponnuru</SPAN itxtvisited="1">
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" itxtvisited="1"><TBODY itxtvisited="1"><TR itxtvisited="1"><TD vAlign=top itxtvisited="1">It is a good thing that other congressmen did not follow Rep. Joe Wilson?s lead. If they yelled out every time President <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_0_0>Obama
</NOBR> said something untrue about health care, they would quickly find themselves growing hoarse.
By our count, the president made more than 20 inaccurate claims in his speech to Congress. We have excluded several comments that are deeply misleading but not outright false. (For example: Obama pledged not to tap the Medicare trust fund to pay for reform. But there is no money in that ?trust fund,? anyway, so the pledge is meaningless.) Even so, we may have missed one or more false statements by the president. Our failure to include one of his comments in the following list should not be taken to constitute an endorsement of its accuracy, let alone wisdom.
1. ?Buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer.? The Congressional Budget Office writes, ?Premiums for policies purchased in the individual insurance market are, on average, much lower ? about one-third lower for single coverage and one-half lower for family policies.? It is true that individual insurance policies are generally 30 percent less comprehensive than employer-provided insurance, and comparable individual policies are about twice as expensive. But much of the extra cost is a function of the tax penalty on purchasing such insurance and the stunted market that penalty has yielded.
. ?There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.?An outright falsehood, whetheryou use the president?s noncitizen-free estimate or the standard, questionable estimate of 46 million uninsured residents.
A study prepared for the federal <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_4_0>government
</NOBR> estimates that 9 million people counted as ?uninsured? in the standard estimate are in fact enrolled in Medicaid. The left-leaning Urban Institute estimates that 12 million are eligible but not enrolled, meaning they could get coverage at any time. Health economists Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania and Kate Bundorf of Stanford estimate that one quarter to three quarters of the uninsured can afford to purchase coverage, but choose not to do so.
3.?And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage.? The paper that generated this estimate assumed that two months of severe job losses would continue forever. Applying that paper?s methodology to a broader period of rising unemployment (January 2008 through August 2009) produces a figure below 9,000.
It also assumes those coverage losses are permanent. Like many of the 46 million Americans we label ?uninsured,? many of those 9,000 will regain coverage after a number of months. (David Freddoso illustrates the absurdity of assuming that all coverage losses are permanent.)
4. ?One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy. . . . They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.? He didn?t die because of it. The originator of this false claim, a writer for Slate named Timothy Noah, has admitted he got it wrong.
5. ?Another woman from Texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne.? Scott Harrington supplied more facts in the Wall Street Journal: ?The woman?s testimony at the June 16 hearing confirms that her surgery was delayed several months. It also suggests that the dermatologist?s chart may have described her skin condition as precancerous, that the insurer also took issue with an apparent failure to disclose an earlier problem with an irregular heartbeat, and that she knowingly underreported her weight on the application.? The woman deserves sympathy, but Obama has stretched the truth here.
6. Rising costs are ?why so many employers . . . are forcing their employees to pay more for insurance.? Perhaps no other issue generates as much of a consensus among health-care economists as this one: The ?employer?s share? of employees? health-care costs comes out of those employees? wages, not out of profits. In this comment and in five others in his speech, Obama contradicts that basic truth. Employers aren?t forcing their employees to pick up a larger share of the bill because they can?t. Workers are already paying the entire bill.
7. Rising costs are ?why American business that compete internationally . . . are at a huge disadvantage.? False. The rising cost of health benefits does not increase employers? labor costs because, again, wages adjust downward to compensate. The Congressional Budget Office, under the leadership of Obama?s OMB director, Peter Orszag, confirmed that health-care costs do not hinder competitiveness. Obama economic aide Christina <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_1_0>Romer
</NOBR> has called this competitiveness argument ?schlocky.?
8. ?Those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it ? about $1,000 per year that pays for somebody else?s emergency room and charitable care.? That number comes from a left-wing advocacy group. A Kaiser Family Foundation study debunked the group?s analysis, reaching an estimate closer to $200 per year for a family. The CBO report mentioned above reached the same conclusion.
9. At this point, Obama said, ?These are the facts. Nobody disputes them.? This comment continues Obama?s already long tradition of trying to curtail debate by denying that anyone disagrees with him.
10. ?[Reform] will slow the growth of health-care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.? In July, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf said, ?In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care costs.? The <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_5_0>CBO
</NOBR> projects that the legislation that Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) has since introduced ?would reduce the federal budgetary commitment to health care, relative to that under current law, during the decade following the 10-year budget window,? but hints that the 40 percent cut in Medicare?s reimbursement rates, which helps Baucus achieve that feat, is politically unrealistic. (More on that below.) Health economist Victor Fuchs writes that the proposals before Congress ?aim at cost shifting rather than cost reduction.? Obama and his allies have yet to demonstrate anything to the contrary.
11. ?Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: Nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.? Obama?s wording is lawyerly: While not denying that his plan would cause people to lose existing coverage with which they are satisfied, he leads us to believe that he is denying it. But even on its own terms, Obama?s claim is false. The CBO estimates that slashing payments to Medicare Advantage, as Obama advocates, ?would reduce the extra benefits that would be made available to beneficiaries through Medicare Advantage plans.? It would also cause some people to lose their coverage.
12. Requiring insurers to cover preventive care ?saves money.? Nope. According to a review in the New England Journal of Medicine, ?Although some preventive measures do save money, the vast majority reviewed in the health economics literature do not.?
13. ?The [bogus] claim . . . that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens . . . is a lie, plain and simple.? Sarah Palin claimed that Obama?s ?death panels? would deny people medical care, not actively kill them. If Palin believes her claim, it is not ?a lie, plain and simple.? Most important, the substance of Palin?s claim is, in fact, true. Obama himself proposed a new Independent Medicare Advisory Council with the authority to deny life-extending care to the elderly and disabled.
14. ?There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I?m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.? For better or worse, the president?s plan would, in his words, insure illegal immigrants. Various federal agencies, immigration critics, and the media all acknowledge that a small number of undocumented aliens obtain Medicaid benefits despite being ineligible. The president seeks to expand Medicaid, which would create greater opportunities for ineligible aliens to enroll.
The House Democrats? health-insurance exchange, which Obama supports, would ?apply to? undocumented aliens. The CRS writes that the House legislation ?does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens participating in the Exchange ? whether the noncitizens are legally or illegally present.? Nor does it require that the legal status of people receiving subsidies be verified.
Finally, Obama supports granting legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, which would make them eligible for government benefits under his health plan
15. ?Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.? Unless Obama refers to some draft legislation inside his head, this claim is false. The House bill allows the ?government option? to pay for abortions directly from the U.S. Treasury. Both the House and Baucus bills would subsidize private insurance that cover abortions. (See Douglas Johnson?s comment on this article.)16. Critics of the public option would ?be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won?t be. I?ve insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.? How quickly we forget the example of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Like those institutions, the public option would benefit from an implicit subsidy: Everyone would know that Washington would not allow the program to fail, and financial institutions would therefore offer it better rates. (During the Clinton administration, Obama adviser Larry Summers reported that a similar implicit guarantee was worth $6 billion per year to Fannie and Freddie.) The public option would thus be able to undercut its less-subsidized competitors.
17. ?And I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need.?Unless the president proposes to abolish insurance, or abolish all care management, there will always be tension between patients, doctors, and public/private insurers over what patients ?need.? Such tensions are sure to arise under the president?s IMAC proposal.
But even if a new program would be ?administered by the government, just like Medicaid or Medicare,? it would interfere in those decisions. As an administrative-law judge wrote to one of us after Obama?s address: ?I am a government bureaucrat . . . and I just happen to be reviewing [six] cases, albeit involving Medicare and Medicaid, where the government has inserted itself between the patient and the care prescribed by the physician.?
18. ?I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits ? either now or in the future.? ?The plan will not add to our deficit.? None of the bills before Congress can credibly claim to keep the deficit from rising. The one that comes closest, the Baucus bill, does so by making the wildly implausible assumption that Congress will allow 40 percent cuts in physician payments under Medicare to take place in 2012. Congress has routinely refused to support much smaller cuts.
19. ?Now, add it all up, and the plan I?m proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years.? Even the supposedly parsimonious Baucus bill would cost closer to $2 trillion than $1 trillion once we ?add it all up.? The <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_7_0>CBO
</NOBR> says that bill would spend a mere $774 billion over ten years, in part because the spending begins late in that ten-year window. Republican staffers on the Senate Budget Committee estimate that the Baucus bill would cost $1.7 trillion over the first ten years of full implementation.
Moreover, the preliminary CBO score does not measure the full cost of the bill because it does not include the mandates Baucus would impose on states (about $37 billion) and the private sector (not yet estimated, but 60 percent of total costs in Massachusetts). The other bills would cost even more.
20. ?The middle class will realize greater security, not higher taxes.? Obama would make health insurance compulsory for the middle class (and everyone else). If he thinks that isn?t a tax, he should listen to his economic <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_11_0>adviser
</NOBR> Larry Summers, or his nominee for assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at HHS, Sherry Glied. Both liken the ?individual mandate? to a tax, as do other prominent health economists like Uwe Reinhardt (Princeton) and Jonathan Gruber (MIT). The CBO affirms that the penalties for non-compliance ?would be equivalent to a tax or fine.?
If Obama thinks the middle class wouldn?t pay the taxes he wants to impose on the ?drug and insurance companies,? he should read this CBO report or talk to the junior senator from West Virginia, who accurately describes those levies as a ?big, big tax? on middle-class coalminers.
21. ?I won?t stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are.? Who are these special interests? In case Obama hadn?t noticed, everyone from the drug-makers to the unions to the insurance companies he demonizes are spending millions to build momentum for his version of reform ? in no small part because Obama has promised to buy them off with middle-class tax dollars.
When President Obama makes a factual claim about health-care policy, he does not deserve the benefit of the doubt about its accuracy. We do not know whether he has been badly misinformed or is deliberately trying to mislead. Either way, he cannot be trusted to reform American health care.
? Michael F. Cannon is director of health-policy studies at the Cato Institute. Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review.
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Obama said that a surgeon makes $30,000 to $50,000 to amputate the foot of a diabetic, while receiving a pittance to prevent the diabetes that necessitated the procedure in the first place.
Fact of the matter-Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and $1,140 for a leg amputation," said ACS
--also have most recent where he tried to dupe the sheep into believing Ins Co declined payment because she was treated for acne--he failed to mention heart condition and lying about weight--
Heres a few additional cons-fibs-stretched truths and out right lies from the grifter-- sources and references provided in article-
You Mislead!
Fact-checking Obama.
By Michael F. Cannon and Ramesh Ponnuru</SPAN itxtvisited="1">
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" itxtvisited="1"><TBODY itxtvisited="1"><TR itxtvisited="1"><TD vAlign=top itxtvisited="1">It is a good thing that other congressmen did not follow Rep. Joe Wilson?s lead. If they yelled out every time President <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_0_0>Obama
</NOBR> said something untrue about health care, they would quickly find themselves growing hoarse.By our count, the president made more than 20 inaccurate claims in his speech to Congress. We have excluded several comments that are deeply misleading but not outright false. (For example: Obama pledged not to tap the Medicare trust fund to pay for reform. But there is no money in that ?trust fund,? anyway, so the pledge is meaningless.) Even so, we may have missed one or more false statements by the president. Our failure to include one of his comments in the following list should not be taken to constitute an endorsement of its accuracy, let alone wisdom.
1. ?Buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer.? The Congressional Budget Office writes, ?Premiums for policies purchased in the individual insurance market are, on average, much lower ? about one-third lower for single coverage and one-half lower for family policies.? It is true that individual insurance policies are generally 30 percent less comprehensive than employer-provided insurance, and comparable individual policies are about twice as expensive. But much of the extra cost is a function of the tax penalty on purchasing such insurance and the stunted market that penalty has yielded.
. ?There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.?An outright falsehood, whetheryou use the president?s noncitizen-free estimate or the standard, questionable estimate of 46 million uninsured residents.
A study prepared for the federal <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_4_0>government
</NOBR> estimates that 9 million people counted as ?uninsured? in the standard estimate are in fact enrolled in Medicaid. The left-leaning Urban Institute estimates that 12 million are eligible but not enrolled, meaning they could get coverage at any time. Health economists Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania and Kate Bundorf of Stanford estimate that one quarter to three quarters of the uninsured can afford to purchase coverage, but choose not to do so. 3.?And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage.? The paper that generated this estimate assumed that two months of severe job losses would continue forever. Applying that paper?s methodology to a broader period of rising unemployment (January 2008 through August 2009) produces a figure below 9,000.
It also assumes those coverage losses are permanent. Like many of the 46 million Americans we label ?uninsured,? many of those 9,000 will regain coverage after a number of months. (David Freddoso illustrates the absurdity of assuming that all coverage losses are permanent.)
4. ?One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy. . . . They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.? He didn?t die because of it. The originator of this false claim, a writer for Slate named Timothy Noah, has admitted he got it wrong.
5. ?Another woman from Texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne.? Scott Harrington supplied more facts in the Wall Street Journal: ?The woman?s testimony at the June 16 hearing confirms that her surgery was delayed several months. It also suggests that the dermatologist?s chart may have described her skin condition as precancerous, that the insurer also took issue with an apparent failure to disclose an earlier problem with an irregular heartbeat, and that she knowingly underreported her weight on the application.? The woman deserves sympathy, but Obama has stretched the truth here.
6. Rising costs are ?why so many employers . . . are forcing their employees to pay more for insurance.? Perhaps no other issue generates as much of a consensus among health-care economists as this one: The ?employer?s share? of employees? health-care costs comes out of those employees? wages, not out of profits. In this comment and in five others in his speech, Obama contradicts that basic truth. Employers aren?t forcing their employees to pick up a larger share of the bill because they can?t. Workers are already paying the entire bill.
7. Rising costs are ?why American business that compete internationally . . . are at a huge disadvantage.? False. The rising cost of health benefits does not increase employers? labor costs because, again, wages adjust downward to compensate. The Congressional Budget Office, under the leadership of Obama?s OMB director, Peter Orszag, confirmed that health-care costs do not hinder competitiveness. Obama economic aide Christina <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_1_0>Romer
</NOBR> has called this competitiveness argument ?schlocky.?8. ?Those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it ? about $1,000 per year that pays for somebody else?s emergency room and charitable care.? That number comes from a left-wing advocacy group. A Kaiser Family Foundation study debunked the group?s analysis, reaching an estimate closer to $200 per year for a family. The CBO report mentioned above reached the same conclusion.
9. At this point, Obama said, ?These are the facts. Nobody disputes them.? This comment continues Obama?s already long tradition of trying to curtail debate by denying that anyone disagrees with him.
10. ?[Reform] will slow the growth of health-care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.? In July, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf said, ?In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care costs.? The <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_5_0>CBO
</NOBR> projects that the legislation that Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) has since introduced ?would reduce the federal budgetary commitment to health care, relative to that under current law, during the decade following the 10-year budget window,? but hints that the 40 percent cut in Medicare?s reimbursement rates, which helps Baucus achieve that feat, is politically unrealistic. (More on that below.) Health economist Victor Fuchs writes that the proposals before Congress ?aim at cost shifting rather than cost reduction.? Obama and his allies have yet to demonstrate anything to the contrary.11. ?Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: Nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.? Obama?s wording is lawyerly: While not denying that his plan would cause people to lose existing coverage with which they are satisfied, he leads us to believe that he is denying it. But even on its own terms, Obama?s claim is false. The CBO estimates that slashing payments to Medicare Advantage, as Obama advocates, ?would reduce the extra benefits that would be made available to beneficiaries through Medicare Advantage plans.? It would also cause some people to lose their coverage.
12. Requiring insurers to cover preventive care ?saves money.? Nope. According to a review in the New England Journal of Medicine, ?Although some preventive measures do save money, the vast majority reviewed in the health economics literature do not.?
13. ?The [bogus] claim . . . that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens . . . is a lie, plain and simple.? Sarah Palin claimed that Obama?s ?death panels? would deny people medical care, not actively kill them. If Palin believes her claim, it is not ?a lie, plain and simple.? Most important, the substance of Palin?s claim is, in fact, true. Obama himself proposed a new Independent Medicare Advisory Council with the authority to deny life-extending care to the elderly and disabled.
14. ?There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I?m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.? For better or worse, the president?s plan would, in his words, insure illegal immigrants. Various federal agencies, immigration critics, and the media all acknowledge that a small number of undocumented aliens obtain Medicaid benefits despite being ineligible. The president seeks to expand Medicaid, which would create greater opportunities for ineligible aliens to enroll.
The House Democrats? health-insurance exchange, which Obama supports, would ?apply to? undocumented aliens. The CRS writes that the House legislation ?does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens participating in the Exchange ? whether the noncitizens are legally or illegally present.? Nor does it require that the legal status of people receiving subsidies be verified.
Finally, Obama supports granting legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, which would make them eligible for government benefits under his health plan
15. ?Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.? Unless Obama refers to some draft legislation inside his head, this claim is false. The House bill allows the ?government option? to pay for abortions directly from the U.S. Treasury. Both the House and Baucus bills would subsidize private insurance that cover abortions. (See Douglas Johnson?s comment on this article.)16. Critics of the public option would ?be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won?t be. I?ve insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.? How quickly we forget the example of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Like those institutions, the public option would benefit from an implicit subsidy: Everyone would know that Washington would not allow the program to fail, and financial institutions would therefore offer it better rates. (During the Clinton administration, Obama adviser Larry Summers reported that a similar implicit guarantee was worth $6 billion per year to Fannie and Freddie.) The public option would thus be able to undercut its less-subsidized competitors.
17. ?And I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need.?Unless the president proposes to abolish insurance, or abolish all care management, there will always be tension between patients, doctors, and public/private insurers over what patients ?need.? Such tensions are sure to arise under the president?s IMAC proposal.
But even if a new program would be ?administered by the government, just like Medicaid or Medicare,? it would interfere in those decisions. As an administrative-law judge wrote to one of us after Obama?s address: ?I am a government bureaucrat . . . and I just happen to be reviewing [six] cases, albeit involving Medicare and Medicaid, where the government has inserted itself between the patient and the care prescribed by the physician.?
18. ?I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits ? either now or in the future.? ?The plan will not add to our deficit.? None of the bills before Congress can credibly claim to keep the deficit from rising. The one that comes closest, the Baucus bill, does so by making the wildly implausible assumption that Congress will allow 40 percent cuts in physician payments under Medicare to take place in 2012. Congress has routinely refused to support much smaller cuts.
19. ?Now, add it all up, and the plan I?m proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years.? Even the supposedly parsimonious Baucus bill would cost closer to $2 trillion than $1 trillion once we ?add it all up.? The <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_7_0>CBO
</NOBR> says that bill would spend a mere $774 billion over ten years, in part because the spending begins late in that ten-year window. Republican staffers on the Senate Budget Committee estimate that the Baucus bill would cost $1.7 trillion over the first ten years of full implementation.Moreover, the preliminary CBO score does not measure the full cost of the bill because it does not include the mandates Baucus would impose on states (about $37 billion) and the private sector (not yet estimated, but 60 percent of total costs in Massachusetts). The other bills would cost even more.
20. ?The middle class will realize greater security, not higher taxes.? Obama would make health insurance compulsory for the middle class (and everyone else). If he thinks that isn?t a tax, he should listen to his economic <NOBR style="COLOR: darkgreen; FONT-SIZE: 100%; FONT-WEIGHT: normal" id=itxt_nobr_11_0>adviser
</NOBR> Larry Summers, or his nominee for assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at HHS, Sherry Glied. Both liken the ?individual mandate? to a tax, as do other prominent health economists like Uwe Reinhardt (Princeton) and Jonathan Gruber (MIT). The CBO affirms that the penalties for non-compliance ?would be equivalent to a tax or fine.?If Obama thinks the middle class wouldn?t pay the taxes he wants to impose on the ?drug and insurance companies,? he should read this CBO report or talk to the junior senator from West Virginia, who accurately describes those levies as a ?big, big tax? on middle-class coalminers.
21. ?I won?t stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are.? Who are these special interests? In case Obama hadn?t noticed, everyone from the drug-makers to the unions to the insurance companies he demonizes are spending millions to build momentum for his version of reform ? in no small part because Obama has promised to buy them off with middle-class tax dollars.
When President Obama makes a factual claim about health-care policy, he does not deserve the benefit of the doubt about its accuracy. We do not know whether he has been badly misinformed or is deliberately trying to mislead. Either way, he cannot be trusted to reform American health care.
? Michael F. Cannon is director of health-policy studies at the Cato Institute. Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review.
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For the record.I never called him a liar.
Its obviously to bad what happened .
Without going into details about him or his story,Im sure there were other outlets for health Insurance besides the military.I suppose a job might have also been a deciding factor(overlooked).
I suspect he was aware of the risks involved when he signed his contract to serve in the military.
Thats my take....
One down 1 to go.FYI ive been out of work for 8 out of 9 months this year TU.Things are badfor me ,just like for most.
But the bills dont stop coming in.Mortgage payment dont get suspended for lack of work.
My 2kids still need necessaties.My older daughter (b average).is still going to college next year.
I suspect on some(not all) of my dime.
I do admit I have my wifes insurance.
I understand peoples concerns with H.I. .
There is support thru unemployment for insurance.
In Mass. I know there is,and its pretty reasonable.
I believe the cost is minimal.
There our other ways to get health Insurance.
People make it seem like there isnt.
And thats just false.
But the bills dont stop coming in.Mortgage payment dont get suspended for lack of work.
My 2kids still need necessaties.My older daughter (b average).is still going to college next year.
I suspect on some(not all) of my dime.
I do admit I have my wifes insurance.
I understand peoples concerns with H.I. .
There is support thru unemployment for insurance.
In Mass. I know there is,and its pretty reasonable.
I believe the cost is minimal.
There our other ways to get health Insurance.
People make it seem like there isnt.
And thats just false.
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Right on Skeeter, he should have got some ass wippings from mom and dad, instead of TIMEOUT.
:142smilie
- Feb 26, 2001
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Now there is some true logic....he cant bring nothing to the table but some sexual conotations. LOL As I said b4 no SUBSTANCE
I'm not working while I am preparing to open my practice.
My wife is now a stay at home mom so we didn't have insurance coverage.
Obviously these are all personal choices, but our coverage I just got from blue cross in NC for my healthy family of 3 is going to cost me 1200 dollars a month.
I'm fortunate to be able to afford that. I just don't understand how most other Americans would be able to. Something has got to change.
How in the world as a new business am I going to be able to afford premiums for my employees when I open with 0 patients. The answer: I'm not going to be able to offer it.
My wife is now a stay at home mom so we didn't have insurance coverage.
Obviously these are all personal choices, but our coverage I just got from blue cross in NC for my healthy family of 3 is going to cost me 1200 dollars a month.
I'm fortunate to be able to afford that. I just don't understand how most other Americans would be able to. Something has got to change.
How in the world as a new business am I going to be able to afford premiums for my employees when I open with 0 patients. The answer: I'm not going to be able to offer it.
