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 October 9, 2009

Senate’s Health Care Reform Has Unknown Costs

The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) preliminary analysis of the conceptual framework (not a complete bill) for the Senate Finance Committee’s health reform has been pegged to only cost taxpayers $829 billion over the next 10 years. But as Heritage and other health policy experts point out, there are a lot of hidden costs that aren’t being reported.

In a newly released Web memo, Heritage health policy analyst Greg D’Angelo points out the latest CBO estimate of the Senate Finance Committee legislation, penned by Chairman Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), is subject to change. Even with the amendments added into the legislative framework, D’Angelo quotes the CBO report that the proposal “has not been embodied in legislative language.” Therefore, lawmakers can and likely will make changes that alter the final price tag, writes D’Angelo, who also examined CBO scores for other health reform bills in Congress.

Health care economist James Capretta, with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, highlights in a new blog the CBO projection assumes Congress will follow through with Medicare and Medicaid cuts. History shows that when lawmakers made “arbitrary, across-the-board cuts, it was only a matter of months before they were scrambling to restore the cuts.” Restoring cuts in Medicare physician fees would add more than $200 billion to the plan’s bottom line, Capretta notes.

Also, Capretta mentions a so-called “firewall” within the Baucus legislation. 

“CBO’s assessment of the Baucus bill is built on the dubious assumption that Congress can hand out a lucrative new entitlement to a limited number of low- and moderate-income voters while denying it to tens of millions of others.

…All but the smallest employers would be required to offer qualifying coverage to their full-time workers to avoid hefty taxes, and the employees would have no choice but to take what is offered to avoid paying a penalty tax themselves.  The“firewall” thus prevents workers from exiting employer-based plans for the exchanges.”

The Senate Finance Committee is expected to vote Tuesday on the legislation.

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Comments Author: Marguerite Higgins
  • John
    Where is America's healthcare reform?
    There is little doubt that something should be done to remedy the problems, most of them caused by politicians, with America's healthcare system. But all I have seen is more of the same: line the pockets of the politicians, the pharmaceutical, insurance, and other 'health' firm executives, at the expense of the American public. Our representatives have publicly stated that it is impossible for them to read the bill in its Legislative entirety and that they will vote based upon the 'plain language' summary. I ask you; should your elected representative vote for, or against, something that they can not even read in the form that ACTUALLY MATTERS??

    The following is the REAL healthcare 'problem' that your representatives should be addressing:

    --------------------
    I cried tonight, helpless, as I watched America upon her death bed.
    I railed against the politicians who ignored the symptoms of the cancerous corruption that ate at her while greedily imagining what else they could do to acquire a share of her inheritance.
    I screamed silently at the citizens, so busy struggling beneath the burden of government, that they had no time to spare for visiting the old lady and considering all that made her great.
    I read the charts, so visible, and struggled to sense the truth of her condition in the hurried scribbling of the press.
    Her blood was corrupted by the lack of truth flowing from her heart in Washington and was eating inexorably at the citizenry that was her flesh.
    Her muscles, weakened by politicians who failed in their duty to remain steadfast to her constitution, could not withstand the assault of a President blatantly twisting them.
    Her bones and tendons cracked and tore as business leaders, anxious to fill their pockets, stretched them beyond endurance to encompass a world that was not hers.
    Her mind, assailed by so much wrong and so much pain, could no longer distinguish reality from fantasy, truth from falsehood, right from wrong, and was ceasing to even try.
    Her prognosis wasn’t good but I thought, and I hoped, that someone might, yet, come to her aid and end her inexorable fall.
    As is the way of things; powers greater than I will decide her fate. I can only pray, and beg, those powers to do what is right while, in my heart, knowing that they are no longer listening.
    I cried tonight, helpless, as I watched America upon her death bed and wept more for all of the generations to come who would not have a chance to truly know her.
    AMERICA! She was a GREAT lady!
    -------------------


    THAT'S plain language. If your representative can't understand it, I respectfully suggest that you replace him/her with someone who can!

    May God help us all!

    PASS IT ON - THE MORE WHO KNOW, AND THE MORE WHO LET THEIR REPRESENTATIVES KNOW, THE BETTER THE CHANCE THAT AMERICA WILL SURVIVE.
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