FixHealthCarePolicy

Foundry Quiz: What Medical Innovations Does The Senate Health Bill Tax?

It is a well known economic policy rule that if you want less of something you tax it, and if you want more of something you subsidize it. Policymakers frequently follow this rule to influence behavior. This is why there are “sin taxes” on things like alcohol and cigarettes, and also why “cap and trade” taxes carbon. This is why there are subsidies for education and for “green” technologies. If taxes and subsidies make any sense at all, they make sense when used to tax “bad” things and subsidize “good” things.

Given this basic rule, can you guess which of these are being subsidized and which taxed in the Reid Health Bill currently in the Senate?

1. Innovative Medical Companies
2. Medical Devices, such as prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs and pacemakers
3. Over-the-counter medicines
4. Privately funded medical care – including private health insurance plans, private medical expenses paid out-of-pocket, and employer-provided care

(answers below the fold) (more…)

Tags: Harry Reid, insurance premiums, medical innovation, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Health Care Plan, senate health care bill

Morning Bell: Who is the President Calling “Extremist?”

Following last Tuesday’s election, the last thing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wanted to do was allow Members of Congress to go home and talk to their constituents about the $2.6 trillion health care bill she was marshaling through Congress. The centerpiece of Pelosi’s trap and pressure campaign was a Saturday address by President Barack Obama in the Cannon Office Building, where Obama warned Democrats: “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit [Democratic voters] and it will encourage the extremists.”

The extremists. That is how the President of the Unites States describes Americans who do not want to see the federal government control over half of all health care spending. And just who are some of these extremists? Looking over just today’s papers we find:

• Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria: “Obama’s message to the country appears to be, “We have a dysfunctional health-care system with out-of-control costs, and let’s add 45 million people to it.” Americans see a health-care bill that has been produced by the old Democratic machine rather than the new Democratic technocrats — more Lyndon Johnson than Larry Summers. It might be the only way to get a law passed, and it might please the party’s base, but it will dismay independents.” (more…)

Tags: caucus, extremist, Fareed Zakaria, House, hoyer, Joe Lieberman, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Health Care Plan

Yes, $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

Pelosi’s Procedural Plan to Pass Health Care

Today at 2pm the House Rules Committee will meet to consider the rule for H.R. 3962 , the Affordable Health Care for America Act. As of this morning 104 amendments had been filed with the Rules Committee for consideration. Republican’s have filed 87 amendments and Democrats have filed 17. The debate in the Rules Committee and a final vote could continue well into this evening.

The rule being debated today will not only cover HR 3962 but will also apply to HR 3961, the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act, also known as the Doc Fix. This is a procedural gimmick that allows the costly Doc Fix bill to be combined with H.R. 3962 after the bill passes the House. This allows Congressional Leaders to avoid a stand alone vote on Doc Fix in the Senate. A few weeks ago, a $247 billion dollar Doc Fix bill failed in the Senate with 13 Democrats opposing ending debate on the bill. (more…)

Tags: H.R. 3962, house rules committee, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Health Care Plan, pelosi health bill, tea party, tea party health care, the Affordable Health Care for America Act

The Spending and Tax Increases of the House Health Bill in Pictures

The key to this chart is the second graph showing the spending “cuts” in the H.R. 3962. Nobody in world believes those cuts will happen. Which is why the true cost of the House health Bill is $1.5 trillion.

Tags: doc fix, Medicare, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Health Care Plan, trillion dollar deficits

The True Cost of the House Health Bill: $1.5 Trillion

Nancy Pelosi has unveiled the new health care bill in the House after merging together three different versions of legislation. To appease moderate Blue Dog Democrats and to meet President Obama’s oft-stated promise that reform wouldn’t cost more than $900 billion in the first ten years, Speaker Pelosi sought to reduce the $1.5 trillion total cost of the bill. Newsflash: she failed.

The Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary score of the bill and while some in the media have been reporting its net cost of $894 billion, the total cost of health reform legislation is more like $1.5 trillion. So, Speaker Pelosi is essentially right back where she started—with a huge (two) thousand page plan that carries a hefty price tag. (more…)

Tags: Medicaid, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Health Care Plan, Obama's failed stimulus

Constitutional Questions are Serious Questions

When CNS News reporter asked Nancy Pelosi “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?,” her response was “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Is Pelosi serious? Did the Speaker Pelosi really say that asking “is this Constitutional” is a trivial question? Could her statement be a gaffe?

Nope. It’s no gaffe. Pelosi’s press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, clarified for the record that asking the speaker of the House to articulate the Constitutional authority for the health care mandate “is not a serious question.”

Frequent readers of the Foundry will recall that we have asked is the Individual Mandate Constitutional and is National Health Insurance Constitutional? We argued in August that the healthcare legislation is unconstitutional: specifically, neither the necessary and proper clause, the general welfare clause, nor the commerce clause of the Constitution give Congress the authority to mandate a national health care. (more…)

Tags: individual mandates, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Health Care Plan

The House Cloakroom: Nov. 2 – 6

Analysis –

After unveiling her 1,990 page health care bill late this week, Speaker Pelosi hopes to have the bill on the House floor by Thursday with work possibly going into Saturday or even into the following week to finish consideration of the legislation. A manager’s amendment is expected to be introduced on Monday with additional details. However, no one is exactly sure how this will play out or if the Speaker has the necessary votes to pass the legislation. You can bet this will dominant the discussion in Washington.

Major Floor Action –

• As early as Thursday the H.R. 3962, the new 1,990 page health care bill could be on the House floor. Heritage Analyst Nina Owcharenko outlines five major faults with the different health care bills be discussed by Congress here.
• Bills expected earlier in the week including H.R. 2868, Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Act and H.R. 3639, Expedited CARD Reform for Consumers Act. (more…)

Tags: cloakroom, health care, house cloakroom, Nancy Pelosi

States Lose Control, Families Lose Choices Under Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion

Speaker Pelosi’s mammoth health legislation, H.R. 3962, includes the largest Medicaid expansion in history, adding as many as 18 million people to the program. Not only will childless adults become eligible for Medicaid for the first time in the history of the program, approximately 5 million children who have been served under the successful and popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) will also be transferred into Medicaid. Speaker Pelosi’s bill preempts the decisions previously made by the elected women and men in state capitols.

For more than 10 years, states have made the choice whether to run their SCHIP programs as a separate non-Medicaid program or as a Medicaid expansion. A majority of states including California which serves the most children under SCHIP have chosen to run separate SCHIP programs. A separate SCHIP program provides states with greater flexibility in managing benefits, service delivery, and eligibility. Under the current SCHIP program, there is no individual entitlement and eligibility is reserved only to those who were previously uninsured. States had the flexibility to impose a waiting period to protect against families dropping their private coverage. All of this will be overridden under the new legislation. State SCHIP programs will be dismantled. (more…)

Tags: Medicaid, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Health Care Plan, schip

Morning 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