Posts Tagged ‘deficit’
In the News
March 4, 2010Morning Bell: “The American Public Is Not Behind This Bill”
After more than a year of $862 billion deficit stimulus bills, national-debt-doubling federal budgets, and government takeovers of the auto industry, it is difficult to remember that President Barack Obama actually ran as a moderate in many ways. On his way to a 53% – 46% win over Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), then-Sen. Obama promised to “cut taxes for 95% of workers and their families,” expand the Army by 65,000 and the Marines by 27,000, and enact “a net spending cut” for the federal government. Obama promised lower taxes, a strong defense and shrinking the size of government. No wonder independents in nine states that went for President George Bush in 2000 and 2004 switched their vote to Obama in 2008 (CO, FL, IN, IA, NV, NM, NC, OH and VA). But now those independents are beginning to reassess. Public Policy Polling (a liberal polling firm) notes that Obama now has a negative approval rating in every state that he flipped from the Bush column to his in 2008.
And now President Obama has lost one of his biggest and earliest supporters on his signature issue: health care. Yesterday, when pressed on CNBC if he would be in favor of scrapping the Senate health care bill, Warren Buffett responded: “I would be.” Specifically, Buffett believes that the Senate bill will not contain health care costs: “We have a health system that, in terms of cost, is really out of control, and if you take this line and you project what has been happening into the future, we will get less and less competitive. So, we need something else. Unfortunately, we came up with a bill that really doesn’t attack the cost situation that much and we have to have a fundamental change.” Buffett is correct on both fronts: 1) the President’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has reported that the Senate health care bill would raise national health expenditures $234 billion by 2019; and 2) our current system is completely unable to control exploding health care costs. (more…)
Tags: deficit, Medicaid Expansion, national debt, ObamaCare, price controls, public opinion, Senate Health Bill, start over, Warren Buffett
In the News
November 9, 2009Yes, $2.6 Trillion! A Closer Look at the Full 10 Years of Spending in the House Health Bill
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership are frantically trying to find enough votes to pass their giant 2,032 page health care legislation this weekend. But before Speaker Pelosi and liberals in Congress pass their big bill, the American taxpayers should be fully aware of the full price tag of this monster.
As Heritage analysts noted earlier in the week, the Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary score of the bill (H.R. 3962) but too many in the media have not been reporting its true cost. The true cost is not the net spending on only the coverage related provisions ($897 billion) but rather the total gross spending for the coverage provisions ($1.05 trillion) as well as any additional spending in the bill (approximately $217 billion). That would raise the plan’s price tag to about $1.5 trillion when including the roughly $210 billion cost of the “doc fix” is included. The “doc fix” refers to the undoing of the flawed Medicare payment update formula, which Congress created but has routinely stopped from being enforced. Under current law, that formula would result in a 20 percent reduction in doctors’ pay under the Medicare program. (more…)
Tags: debt, deficit, Medicare, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Health Care Plan, spending, tax, trillion
In the News
October 30, 2009Morning Bell: The Pelosi Blueprint for Government Run Health Care
The new House health care bill (H.R. 3962) unveiled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) yesterday clocks in at 1,990 pages and about 400,000 words. As written, the bill purports to cost only $1.05 trillion over the first ten years and is paid for by over $700 billion in tax increases and cuts to Medicare Advantage and Medicare prescription drug payments. But as troubling as those numbers are, the scariest thing about the bill is the solid foundation it lays for a complete government take over of the health care sector of our economy.
The Washington Post describes the bill as “creating an expensive new entitlement program (subsidies to purchase health insurance) and dramatically expanding an existing one (Medicaid).” This is true by itself, but the Post later dismissively adds: “If you’ve noticed that we haven’t talked about the public option in the House bill, that’s not an oversight. For all the fury over the issue, it doesn’t matter that much; the CBO estimates that the government-run plan would actually have slightly higher premiums.” This is a breathtakingly naive statement by the Post and demonstrates that they have not yet fully grasped how all the different elements of the bill are designed to interact to produce President Barack Obama’s desired outcome. (more…)
Tags: 3962, Barack Obama, CBO, debt, deficit, entitlement, government takeover, Medicaid, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Health Care Plan, tax increases
Latest Research
October 16, 2009Guest Blogger: Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) Obama’s Health Care Promises
When President Obama spoke to Congress on his health care plan, I was thinking about the 16-day stretch in July during which his bill was being assembled on Capitol Hill. That’s because so much of what he told us, whether about deficits, illegal aliens or abortions, seemed at odds with what the Congress is doing in his name.
“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future,” the president said. He was unequivocal, and I applaud his promise, but the Congressional Budget Office reports that the Obama health care bill making its way through the House, H.R. 3200, will add $220 billion to the U.S. budget deficits over 10 years. A new report issued on Sept. 9 by the Peterson Foundation found that it will create an additional $1 trillion in deficit spending between 2020 and 2029.
The conclusion? The president says he won’t sign anything with a deficit, but record-breaking federal budget deficits form a prominent, permanent part of his party’s health care plan, so we’ll see. (more…)
Tags: Barack Obama, Congressional Budget Office, deficit, health care
Latest Research
October 12, 2009The Baucus Bait And Switch
Throughout the health care debate, President Barack Obama repeatedly promised the American people that his health care plan “will help bring our deficits under control in the long term.” The problem is that the White House could not get the Congressional Budget Office to cooperate. Throughout the summer the CBO issued report after report showing that the versions of Obamacare working their way through Congress all added to the deficit.
First, CBO found that the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) bill would increase the deficit by $1 trillion. Three weeks later, the CBO released a report on a revised bill showing HELP 2.0 only raised the deficit by $597 billion. The House then got a little clever and tried to game the CBO scoring system by phasing in the major spending of their bill over time, but even that maneuver left them with $245 billion added to the deficit in the first ten years (with crippling deficits to come as the entitlement spending ramped up in the out years).
Enter Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-MT) who was determined to manipulate the CBO’s scoring system as best he could and deliver a deficit neutral version of Obamacare. After months of working directly with CBO staff, Baucus scored a victory for Obamacare yesterday when the CBO released a preliminary analysis purporting to show that the Baucus bill would reduce deficits by a total of $81 billion over the next decade. The New York Times awarded Baucus with the headline that the White House has been searching for since the debate first began: “Health Care Bill Gets Green Light in Cost Analysis.” But this headline and the accompanying article are fundamentally dishonest. As the Politico reported yesterday: “While the media and lawmakers often shorthand a CBO letter as a “score” or “cost estimate,” today’s CBO letter is neither. Because the bill is still in “conceptual,” or layman’s terms, CBO’s letter today was a “preliminary analysis.” For it to be an official cost estimate, the bill has to be translated into legislative language.” (more…)
Tags: Barack Obama, baucus, CBO, deficit, finance committee, HELP, Obama Health Care Plan, Vapor Bill
In the News
September 11, 2009Obama’s Deficient Budget Pledge
President Obama’s address to a Joint Session of Congress on health care reform included a range of urgings, pleadings, and partisan jabs, and a single bright line in the sand dealing not with health care per se but with the deficit. The President said, “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period.”
Before we get too carried away cheering the President’s sudden fealty to fiscal sanity we need to remember he did say the bill should come in at around $900 billion over 10 years. According to the various drafts and legislation circulating on Capital Hill, some of this would be offset with spending cuts but much of this amount represents a net expansion of government. Health care reform should not be used as an excuse to grow government. Health care reform should be spending neutral, not just budget neutral. (more…)
Tags: budget deficit, deficit, health care, Obama Health Care Plan, ObamaCare
In the News
August 10, 2009Dissent Is Not “Un-American”
Whether the source is Gallup, Pew, Quinnipiac, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the Washington Post, or even the New York Times; every recent poll on the issue shows that either pluralities or majorities of Americans have serious doubts about President Barack Obama’s health care plan. Reviewing the month’s polling data, Gallup’s Frank Newport sums it up: “The bottom line is a sense that, while Americans apparently favor some type of healthcare reform in the long term, they are in no hurry to see healthcare reform legislation passed in the short-term on a rushed schedule. … A Pew Research poll released this week shows that those who are worried about new health care legislation are most likely to say it is because it involves too much spending and would increase the deficit.”
Tags: deficit, health care plan, President Barack Obama, townhall, un-American
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