Sen. Coburn Weighs the Reid Bill: It’s 20.8 Pounds
Here are some additional findings by the numbers:
2,074 — pages in the bill
$1.2 billion — cost to taxpayers per page
70 — new government programs authorized by the bill
1,697 — times the Secretary of Health and Human Services is given authority to create, determine, or define things in the bill
24 million — people left without health insurance
$8 billion — taxes levied on uninsured individuals
$25 billion — additional Medicaid mandates placed on states
$28 billion — new taxes on employers not providing government-approved plans
$118 billion — cuts to Medicare Advantage
$465 billion — total cuts to Medicare
$494 billion — revenue from new taxes/fees levied on American families and businesses
$2.5 trillion — cost for the first ten years of full implementation of the legislation
You don’t really have to say anything, do you? The numbers tell the story on their own.
It’s 20.8 pounds of evil doing.
Has anybody pointed out that after all is said and done, only about half of the uninsured will be insured. Remember all of the talk during the election about “universal coverage” being the goal of health care reform? You don’t hear much about that anymore.
70 new government programs? Exactly what we need. More bureaucracy.
Interesting. For some reason I had the impression that most of the cuts to Medicare were in fact to Medicare Advantage. Apparently not.
All the cost estimates from the CBO are gross underestimates because they do not include by far the greatest cost: out healthcare industry’s costs to implement the many tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and regulations that will be created by the various bureaucracies responsible for implementing the 2000 pages of legislation. As someone immersed in the healthcare industry for the past 30 years, I can testify that the primary reason our healthcare costs twice what is should is the cost of coping with the price controls and central micromanagement ALREADY imposed by Medicare and Medicaid (aped by the private insurers). If current legislation passes, costs are guaranteed to continue to skyrocket, with negative effects on quality and accessibility.
Yours for Better Healthcare,
Daniel Jones, MD
Eureka Springs, Arkansas