Last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rammed through her version of Obamacare almost a week before the agency in charge of running Medicare and Medicaid, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS), could issue its non-partisan and independent analysis of the legislation. And for supporters of the President’s plan, it’s a good thing she did. The CMMS report eviscerated almost every single promise the President has made about his health care plan.
According to that report, Obamacare: 1) raises health care costs; 2) causes millions of Americans to lose their current health care coverage; 3) forces millions of Americans to pay fines and still receive no health insurance; 4) causes millions of seniors to lose their Medicare Advantage plans; 4) places millions of Americans on welfare; 5) jeopardizes Medicare access for all seniors; 6) worsens health care access for the poor.
This past Friday, CMMS issued another report, this time on Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) version of Obamacare and the verdict was in many ways worse: 1) health care costs would rise by $234 billion; 2) 17 million Americans would be forced out of their existing health insurance; 3) 19 million Americans would pay $29 billion in taxes/fines and receive no health care in return; 4) 33% of all Medicare Advantage customers would lose their health care plan; 5) 18 million Americans would be put on welfare; 6) the $493 billion in Medicare cuts would force 20% of Medicare providers to become unprofitable thus jeopardizing access to care for all seniors; and 7) the explosion in Medicaid recipients would exacerbate existing health care access problems for the poor.
The week before the Senate began debating Obamacare, CNN conducted a poll and found that Americans narrowly opposed the plan, 49% to 46%. Now that the Senate has been debating the plan for two weeks, and CMMS has issued two devastating reports on what the impacts of Obamacare would be, opposition to the plan has skyrocketed. This Friday’s latest CNN poll showed 61% of Americans now oppose Obamacare compared to just 36% who support it.
Liberals are is beginning to see the writing on the wall. They know that if Obamacare fails to pass the Senate this year, the battle will be on to explain its failure. For them, the story can not be that President Barack Obama tried to push too ambitious a government health plan. It must be that the President and Congress did not go far enough to the left to satisfy the supposedly government-hungry American people. Hence the left is now attacking the White House and Reid over the public option, the employer mandate, drug reimportation, abortion, and health insurance spending caps.
Obamacare is not dead yet. Speaker Pelosi has signaled that she will quickly pass anything that comes out of the Senate, so Reid could still cave on almost everything and get a terrible bill from everybody’s prospective on the President’s desk by New Years. But Senators thinking about moving quickly should remember that the public strongly opposes this bill, and that opposition is only rising.
Quick Hits:
- The Senate passed the $450 billion minibus spending bill Sunday, approving 12% spending increases for many domestic programs when the deficit is already $1.4 trillion and growing.
- The minibus did not save the successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, closing off opportunity for future students and subjecting existing participants to onerous requirements and site visits.
- Before his meeting with top banking CEOs today, President Barack Obama called Wall Street bankers “fat cats” on 60 Minutes and is demanding bankers tell their loan officers they will not be rewarded for turning down loans.
- Copenhagen negotiations are far apart as poorer countries are demanding billions in financial payments before they agree to reduce emissions.
- Iran’s latest comments on their uranium enrichment intentions fall well short of what they agreed to with the Obama administration, French, Russian and International Atomic Energy Agency negotiators this October.
In his primetime health care address before a Joint Session of Congress, President Barack Obama promised the American people: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period.” But it is hard work adding $1 trillion in government spending while claiming with a straight face that you are not adding to the deficit. Enter White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who has just the solution: just strip out $247 billion of the spending in the bill, pass it separately, and voila … your job just got one-fourth easier.
The specific issue at hand is the centrally planned price control regime the federal government uses to reimburse doctor’s who participate in Medicare. Medicare reimburses doctors and other medical professionals for their services according to a congressionally created fee schedule that is annually adjusted by the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula. The idea is relatively simple: If Medicare spending grows faster than our overall economy (which is almost always the case), then payments to Medicare providers are supposed to be reduced proportionately to keep expenditures in line over a period of time.
Problem is every year Congress–under both Democratic and Republican leadership–routinely blocks the cuts from going into effect. Subsequently, the necessary cumulative cut in Medicare payments grows bigger. Without a change to current law, payments to physicians would be reduced by 21.5% as of January 1, 2010. The Senate Finance Committee bill addresses this problem by raising the reimbursement rate for one year and then pretending that Congress will allow massive cuts for the next 9 years. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) rightfully called the Senate Finance Committee proposal a façade.
The Obama administration’s proposed solution, however, is no more honest. Instead of pretending Congress will cut doctor’s Medicare reimbursement rates, the Senate wants to pretend the doc fix isn’t part of health care reform. So Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) dissembled Friday: “Correcting the Medicare doctors’ payment discrepancy is a budgetary problem — health insurance reform tackles a serious regulatory problem. That’s why we need to fix the Medicare doctors’ payments first, outside of health reform.” The Washington Post editorial board responded this morning:
Mr. Reid’s attempt to distinguish the budgetary and regulatory issues is nonsensical. The health reform measure includes all sorts of changes in the ways that various providers are compensated. True, the problem with inadequate Medicare payments is something of a preexisting condition to health reform, but that does not make it unrelated. The so-called doc fix is being rushed to the Senate floor this week in advance of health reform not because it has nothing to do with health reform but because it has everything to do with it.
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A president who says that he is serious about dealing with the dire fiscal picture cannot credibly begin by charging this one to the national credit card, with no concern for the later generations who will have to pay the bill.
And it is the later generations that should be particularly concerned with this shell game. That $247 billion price tag is just the ten year cost of the doc fix. Looking over the long-term, the 75-year cost to our national debt is another $3 trillion. This past Friday the Obama administration admitted that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before and the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945. Just like Obamacare’s massive expansion of the Medicaid rolls, the doc fix shell game exposes the fact that Obamacare is just a continuation of the current budget busting health care system, not real reform.
Quick Hits:
- According to data from the Congressional Budget Office and Kaiser Family Foundation, Obamacare would expand Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to the point that nearly one in five Americans would be on government programs that provide health care to the poor. This would be the biggest single expansion since Medicaid was created in 1965.
- California is poised to become the first state to ban big-screen TVs due to their power-heavy demands.
- According to an internal Energy Department audit, the Energy Star program (which the Obama administration threw $300 million of ’stimulus’ at) doesn’t properly track whether manufacturers that give their appliances an Energy Star label have met the required specifications for energy efficiency.
- The high-mileage car tax credit in President Obama’s failed stimulus allows for a federal tax credit generous enough to pay for half or even two-thirds of the average sticker price of a golf cart.
- U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits — including Americans — are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps.