Dems: GOP rollback of HCR would increase the deficit.

[DaemonSeid]

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released an estimate of the Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and finds the GOP plan explodes the deficit and will have a devastating impact on the health of millions of Americans.

According to CBO, here’s what the GOP repeal bill means for Americans:

Adds $230 billion to the deficit over the first ten years and more than $1.2 trillion in the second decade (around one-half percent of GDP)

32 million Americans will lose health coverage

Americans will get fewer health benefits for their money

Americans purchasing health insurance on their own will see their costs rise

Health care premiums for Americans getting coverage through large employers will go up

http://www.democraticleader.gov/blog/?p=3308

[Drolefille]

That's nice and all but they don't have the senate and the house or enough votes in either to override a veto, so this is all just bull anyway.

[BluPhire]

Originally Posted by skidrock

How does eliminating free services to 32 million people with no money going to cost the US money?

The only way the US saves money is if the 32 million actually contribute to the plan. They obviously will not contribute since they do not have any money. If they did have money they would spend in to big screen TV, X box, and limited edition sneakers since they are the real needs in the hood.

Not as crass as how you put it, but the cost at large cap companies have already gone up with the passage of the bill, and the companies have already passed it on. Repeal will do no such thing. This is for many companies an excuse to not offer as much in terms of cost in relation to coverage and place the blame elsewhere.

[FHwku]

Uncertainty Surrounding the Estimates.
The projections of the bill’s budgetary impact are quite uncertain, both because CBO has not completed
a detailed estimate of the effects of H.R. 2 and because assessing the effects
of making broad changes in the nation’s health care and health insurance
systems—or of reversing scheduled changes—requires assumptions about a
broad array of technical, behavioral, and economic factors. However,
CBO’s staff, in consultation with outside experts, has devoted a great deal
of care and effort to the analysis of health care legislation in the past few
years, and the agency strives to develop estimates that are in the middle of
the distribution of possible outcomes. As a result, CBO believes that its
estimates of the net budgetary effects of health care legislation have a
roughly equal chance of turning out to be too high or too low.

that's from the letter. i doubt that the GOP or Speaker Boehner will consider anything the CBO has put forth until their detailed estimate comes out. the letter was cc'd to one of my senators, Mitch McConnell, and i doubt he'll even read the letter, let alone entertain any notion that the democrats might have a better plan.

that said, i'd just as soon there be no movement on H.R. 2 until the detailed analysis and budgetary impact are released. but i like the contrast in the names of the bills:
...............H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act
.................................................. .......vs
...............Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, Public Law 111-148)

[Elephant Walk]

"Nevertheless, even good guesswork is still guesswork. As the George Mason economist Arnold Kling says, “it is literally an impossible task” to accurately make the sort of projections the CBO specializes in. “We don’t do controlled experiments in economics,” Kling says. “So when you’re talking about figuring out the effects of health care policy, it’s very difficult.”

Part of the difficulty is that the CBO is trying to replicate systems it can’t really see. To understand the problems with building an economic model, consider what it takes to make a working scale-model train. To build that train, you’d first need accurate information about how the full-size train works: how big its parts are, at what speed those parts move, its power consumption and control system. Imagine trying to build a model train without ever being allowed to look inside the engine compartment. A smart engineer would be able to make reasonably educated guesses about the internal workings by measuring the outside and by looking at various external controls, but those guesses would almost certainly come with a high margin of error.

That’s no small part of the problem for the CBO. When scoring legislation, they’re essentially trying to build small-scale working models of systems using fairly limited data sets. For example, according to Reischauer and Billheimer, the National Health Interview Survey provided CBO analysts with data on “health insurance coverage, health states, use of health services and socioeconomic variables.” But these sources provided “no data on premiums or cost-sharing requirements, and no indication of the exact share of premiums paid by employers.”

http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/08/the-gatekeeper/1

I don't personally like the corporatist bill that was passed. But I doubt the Republican plan is much better.

[PiKA2001]

I wouldn't want a law passed or rejected based on the estimates coming from the CBO. CBO is always off. Like way off. Look up their past projections VS actual costs for Medicare. The real costs ended up tens of billions more than the projections.

[AOII Angel]

Not having a fix to healthcare obviously does cost us all. Who do you think pays for all the free care that is provided to people right now in ERs all across America? ERs cannot turn away anyone, no matter what their insurance status. When hospitals can't collect from patients' without insurance and no ability to pay (including illegal immigrants that everyone was so interested to make sure were not included in any healthcare plan, btw) they pass that cost on to the rest of us through increased fees to self-pay patients and to health insurance companies. This means that health insurance companies then increase their rates. There is no free lunch. And you don't even get good care at the ER since there is not continuity of care and many ER facilities are overrun with patients meaning they have excessively long waits, and patient care suffers.

[PiKA2001]

Originally Posted by AOII Angel

Not having a fix to healthcare obviously does cost us all. Who do you think pays for all the free care that is provided to people right now in ERs all across America? ERs cannot turn away anyone, no matter what their insurance status. When hospitals can't collect from patients' without insurance and no ability to pay (including illegal immigrants that everyone was so interested to make sure were not included in any healthcare plan, btw) they pass that cost on to the rest of us through increased fees to self-pay patients and to health insurance companies. This means that health insurance companies then increase their rates. There is no free lunch.

You're right, there is no free lunch( unless of course you're one of the people mentioned who don't pay for their healthcare). When ObamaCare goes into full effect I'll be subsidizing the people who can't afford to buy their own insurance thru higher premiums and potentially higher taxes. If ObamaCare is repealed, I'll still be subsidizing the un-insured via higher insurances premiums and higher medical costs. To be honest, it kind of makes me apathetic to whole issue.

[AOII Angel]

Originally Posted by PiKA2001

You're right, there is no free lunch( unless of course you're one of the people mentioned who don't pay for their healthcare). When ObamaCare goes into full effect I'll be subsidizing the people who can't afford to buy their own insurance thru higher premiums and potentially higher taxes. If ObamaCare is repealed, I'll still be subsidizing the un-insured via higher insurances premiums and higher medical costs. To be honest, it kind of makes me apathetic to whole issue.

Actually, it would be better to have people insured going to see primary care providers who can take care of problems before they get out of control rather than to provide emergency-only medicine as the alternative. ER visits are the most expensive type of medical care we have in our system. It is much more expensive than providing everyone with standard of care preventative care because we don't then bill them by the minute. The two options are not equivalent even though you are still paying for the same people.

[*winter*]

Originally Posted by AOII Angel

Not having a fix to healthcare obviously does cost us all. Who do you think pays for all the free care that is provided to people right now in ERs all across America? ERs cannot turn away anyone, no matter what their insurance status. When hospitals can't collect from patients' without insurance and no ability to pay (including illegal immigrants that everyone was so interested to make sure were not included in any healthcare plan, btw) they pass that cost on to the rest of us through increased fees to self-pay patients and to health insurance companies. This means that health insurance companies then increase their rates. There is no free lunch. And you don't even get good care at the ER since there is not continuity of care and many ER facilities are overrun with patients meaning they have excessively long waits, and patient care suffers.

AMEN!!! Great post

What most people don't realize is we are already paying for much of the healthcare for uninsured people!

[PiKA2001]

Originally Posted by *winter*

AMEN!!! Great post

What most people don't realize is we are already paying for much of the healthcare for uninsured people!

I disagree

I think a lot of people realize that we are covering the uninsured and its because of that fact they wonder, "what's the point?". Why reconstruct the healthcare industry when something like opening up eligibility to Medicare would seem like a better solution to dealing with the uninsured. We also can't assume that people WILL take preventative care or see a primary care physician (do they still exist?) VS a hospital or an urgent care if they have any health issues. I'm insured, but I haven't been to an actual Dr.s office in YEARS, but I have been to the hospital/urgent care several times.

[*winter*]

I love the Urgent Care places too!

Hopefully if they are able to offer people lower cost private insurance plans, and large employers have to expand their benefits...more people will have privatized heathcare, as opposed to none or Medicaid. An HMO is totally different than free services because people will have to adhere to the rules of an insurance plan. Which means use your benefits wisely or else be charged for what you've used. But maybe I'm an optomist, who knows?

Either way, I think reform is inevitable.

[AOII Angel]

Originally Posted by PiKA2001

I disagree

I think a lot of people realize that we are covering the uninsured and its because of that fact they wonder, "what's the point?". Why reconstruct the healthcare industry when something like opening up eligibility to Medicare would seem like a better solution to dealing with the uninsured. We also can't assume that people WILL take preventative care or see a primary care physician (do they still exist?) VS a hospital or an urgent care if they have any health issues. I'm insured, but I haven't been to an actual Dr.s office in YEARS, but I have been to the hospital/urgent care several times.

Why do you do that? Probably because you are young and healthy. Many people who aren't insured would actually like to go to a regular doctor because they aren't so young and healthy and would actually benefit from preventative care. For a lot of problems, they get little help from the ER. High blood pressure, diabetes, etc are poorly controlled in an ER management setting, and the end result is renal failure needing dialysis, heart attacks, heart failure and strokes. Many of these people end up costing us more in disability payments when they can't work because they are completely decompensated by their congestive heart failure, etc. This is one example of why ER care is inappropriate for anything other than EMERGENCIES. It also prevents people who really need emergency care from getting prompt care if the waiting room is full of people who need a prescription refill or treatment for an ingrown toenail or a runny nose or a headache last week that went away after ten minutes (don't laugh, it happens.) These people get seen for 10x the cost of the same visit at a primary care physicians office (and yes, these guys still exist-- some of them are actually struggling to find patients in this economy.)

[AGDee]

Originally Posted by PiKA2001

I disagree

I think a lot of people realize that we are covering the uninsured and its because of that fact they wonder, "what's the point?". Why reconstruct the healthcare industry when something like opening up eligibility to Medicare would seem like a better solution to dealing with the uninsured. We also can't assume that people WILL take preventative care or see a primary care physician (do they still exist?) VS a hospital or an urgent care if they have any health issues. I'm insured, but I haven't been to an actual Dr.s office in YEARS, but I have been to the hospital/urgent care several times.

If you had my insurance, you would be required to see your primary care doctor at least once per year and get specific tests done annually or else you'd have a huge annual deductible and extremely high co-pays. You would re-think that hospital/urgent care visit because the co-pay is 5 times as much as going to your primary care.

[Drolefille]

Originally Posted by PiKA2001

I disagree

I think a lot of people realize that we are covering the uninsured and its because of that fact they wonder, "what's the point?". Why reconstruct the healthcare industry when something like opening up eligibility to Medicare would seem like a better solution to dealing with the uninsured. We also can't assume that people WILL take preventative care or see a primary care physician (do they still exist?) VS a hospital or an urgent care if they have any health issues. I'm insured, but I haven't been to an actual Dr.s office in YEARS, but I have been to the hospital/urgent care several times.

As someone pro-single-party health care I support opening up eligibility to Medicare for all. Rep. Anthony Weiner, NY is in favor of this idea and I'm a fan of him too. But people are even more against that because of the spectre of socialism and death panels.