NPR fact checks Medicare Advantage cuts discussed by McConnell: Ignores CMS, CBO and other estimates of harm to the elderly.
SEIU discovers free market health care abroad: Can’t understand why we don’t have it in this country.
The Blue Cross study is in fact more precise than CBO’s because it is based on real market data, rather than modeling assumptions. The association mined the actuarial data from its six million individual or small-business policies, nearly one-eighth of those sold in the U.S.
Oliver Wyman (in a study for BlueCross Blue Shield) finds that premiums will be much higher under the Senate health bill than the CBO has estimated. Premiums for individuals and families purchasing coverage on their own will go up 54%. Premiums for small businesses will go up 20%. Both numbers are over 5 years and both numbers exclude the impact of medical inflation.
What do you call it when some people pay just 4 percent of their income for health insurance while others pay 20 percent and virtually everyone but the lowest quintile of wage earners will end up paying more than they do now?
You call it a welfare program masquerading as health care reform.
In a November 2, 2009 letter to Representative Rangel, the Congressional Budget Office calculates what estimated payments will be for the health insurance “reference plan” at various levels of income in 2016. The lavish plan that the bill defines as basic, combined with the massive web of subsidies and taxes, ensures that individuals who make more than $20,000 a year are going to be paying quite a bit more for health insurance than they do now.
Here’s what the CBO estimates that single people and families will be paying by income level:
Source: Congressional Budget Office. Letter to Representative Charles B. Rangel, November 2, 2009. http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10691/hr3962SubsidiesRangelLtr.pdf
Excerpted from Andy Chasin, Senate Republican Policy Committee:
This is Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt:
As Post health reporter Ceci Connolly explained in a front-page story last week, the House bill also does not do much to lower costs. It includes some valuable pilot programs. But it doesn’t end the tax break for employer-provided insurance, a break that is both highly regressive and encourages spending. It doesn’t allow for much evidence-based medicine that could wring excess treatment out of the system. It doesn’t empower an independent commission that could make cost-control decisions that are too hard for Congress. It doesn’t target the cost of malpractice litigation and defensive medicine.
[Meanwhile], according to a CBO analysis, the government will be spending 24.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2019 while raising only 19 percent in revenue: a huge, unsustainable gap.
This is John Cassidy, writing in The New Yorker:
Reductions in Medicare outlays, according to this CBO analysis, would save four hundred and twenty-six billion dollars between 2010 and 2019 compared with current plans. Look a bit more closely, and you find that more than half of the Medicare savings (two hundred and twenty-nine billion dollars) come from cutting payments to providers of services under the regular program; most of the rest (a hundred and seventy billion dollars) come from changing the way payments are set in the Medicare Advantage program. Does anybody really believe that these savings will materialize? For decades now, Congress has been promising to reduce the growth of Medicare outlays, and yet every year they continue to go up.
Sebelius defends censorship. The government will tell seniors all they need to know.
Health bill gives breaks to hospitals, coal miners and clinical labs: Don’t you wish you had a lobbyist in Washington?
Behind Closed Doors
This is from a Wall Street Journal editorial:
Currently, the federal government pays about 57 cents out of every dollar the states spend on Medicaid, though the “matching rate” ranges as high as 76% in some states. That would rise to 95% [under the Baucus bill] —but only for five years. After that, who knows? It all depends on which budget Congress ends up ruining. Either the states will be slammed, or Washington will extend these extra payments into perpetuity—despite the fact that CBO expects purely federal spending on Medicaid to consume 5% of GDP by 2035 under current law.
