Democrat Leader: Repealing Obamacare Is Unconstitutional

@Nan G, #31:

It seems to me that the document that paragraph is from hardly makes the republicans’ case for repeal of the Health Care Reform Bill.

Marsha Blackburn R-TN was interviewed today and she’s introducing the Shadegg bill tomorrow. Allows sale across state lines. She said costs to TennesseeCare quadrupled from what it was estimated to be.

Also, today’s WSJ Health Care Repeal Won’t Add to the Deficit written by the following three gentlemen: (will just c&p, long suspected some don’t visit the links)

Mr. Holtz-Eakin is president of the American Action Forum and a former director of CBO. Mr. Antos is Wilson Taylor Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former assistant director at CBO. Mr. Capretta is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former associate director at the Office of Management and Budget.

Repealing this bill will not add to the deficit, leaving it as is will costing a whopping $2.3 trillion:

Federal finances are buckling under the weight of unaffordable entitlement programs. So what is the primary aim of the ACA? Open-ended entitlement expansion: to more people at greater expense than anytime since the 1960’s. If CBO is right, 32 million people will be added to the health entitlement rolls, at a cost of $938 billion through 2019, and growing faster than the economy or revenues thereafter.

How, then, does the ACA magically convert $1 trillion in new spending into painless deficit reduction? It’s all about budget gimmicks, deceptive accounting, and implausible assumptions used to create the false impression of fiscal discipline.

For starters, that $1 trillion price is a low-ball estimate, covering only six – not ten – years of subsidies that don’t begin until 2014. The uninsured were clearly less of a priority than the deception of making the law look less expensive than it really is over its first decade. Over ten years of full implementation, it’s more like $2.3 trillion.

Next up is the CLASS Act (for the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act) providing a new long-term care insurance entitlement. CLASS hitched a ride on the ACA for one reason only: premiums are collected in the first ten years, but no benefits are provided. Voila, it creates the perception of $70 billion in deficit reduction. In fact, CLASS is a bailout waiting to happen, as it will attract mainly sick enrollees. Only in Washington could the creation of a reckless entitlement program be used as “offset” to grease the way for another entitlement.

The deepest spending cuts in the ACA are in Medicare. Let us be very clear: Medicare needs real reform that generates genuine budget savings. Sadly, the ACA’s cuts are illusory. Medicare’s payments to health care providers would fall below those of Medicaid. The network of hospitals and physicians willing to care for Medicaid patients is notoriously constrained. About 15 percent of the nation’s hospitals would have to stop seeing Medicare patients in just a few years to stem their losses. The idea that Medicare could pay less than Medicaid is such sheer folly that Congress will rapidly reverse course. What’s worse, ACA’s advocates are double-counting this fictional savings, claiming it can pay both for the ACA’s entitlements and Medicare solvency too. The truth is, these cuts cannot be relied upon to pay for anything.

The fantasy of deficit reduction from the ACA is also built on a $410 billion tax increase over the coming decade, and a flood of revenue in the years after built on cynically replicating the flawed AMT-style revenue creep. New Medicare taxes initially apply only to individuals with incomes over $200,000 and couples with incomes above $250,000. But those income thresholds do not rise with inflation, so more and more families will pay them each year. Similarly, the new “Cadillac tax” on expensive insurance applies to premiums for family coverage above $27,500 in 2018, but that threshold will rise with general inflation, not medical costs. It’s particularly noteworthy that this tax is instrumental to the claim of deficit reduction in the second decade, but it is so controversial that Barack Obama was never willing to collect it himself. Overall, CBO says the ACA’s tax hikes will reach 1.2 percent of GDP in 2035, or a whopping $180 billion annually in today’s terms.

So, even if CBO’s analysis were flawless, the authors of the ACA guaranteed a misleading bottom line. Their legislative prescriptions were written to create deficit reduction only on paper — not in reality.

In addition, a central CBO assumption could be disastrously off the mark. Today there are about 111 million Americans who could qualify for help to buy insurance through the exchanges, if they weren’t eligible for an employer plan. CBO assumes that only 19 million of them would be getting new premium assistance in 2019 even though the new subsidies are so generous that low- and moderate-income workers come out way ahead if they get paid in cash, not benefits, and move to the new entitlement.

With such a large financial incentive, eventually those who would be better off in the exchanges will end up there, and costs will soar. If only the 35 million lowest wage-workers leave their job-based plans, federal spending will rise by another $1 trillion in just the first decade.

The history of federal entitlements is one of inexorable growth. Once erected, more and more people get added to the programs. The ACA will be no different. Spending will soar, and the tax hikes and spending “offsets” that were cobbled together to get the bill passed will either wither away or vanish altogether.

Repeal isn’t a budget buster; keeping the ACA is. Assertions to the contrary are, well, audacious.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576089702354292100.html

@MataHarley, #32:

“Never made it out of committee” pretty much nullifies any possibilty of a proposal’s real-world relevance. I would observe that republicans recently had controlling majorities of both the House and Senate for over a decade, and could have addressed serious health care problems in a fashion that most certainly would have been relevant. They didn’t.

The amendments listed were ignored because they got in the way of a long-standing goal democrats were pursuing with single-minded purpose. A number of the amendments had obvious political “poison pill” elementa by design. They were simply spat out. It was decided that reaching a goal that would fundamentally change the landscape for millions of Americans lacking access to health care was worth the political damage. The approach was reckless, but to my mind far from irresponsible.

With their new House majority, republicans are now in a position to propose any number of measures that could greatly improve health care reform. No one takes the position that what has been passed already is perfect. Tort reform strikes me as an excellent idea. If it was so important before, why don’t republicans bring it up now? I imagine they’d have a lot of bipartisan support.

I don’t know what they’re expecting to happen if their whole game is to roll everything back to pre-“Obamacare” conditions. Do they really want to reinstate denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions? To drop millions of adults and children back into uninsured status? To reinstate abusive recission practices? To bring back lifetime limits for the seriously ill? To eliminate the tax breaks for small businesses providing health insurance for their employees? How do they propose to deal with escallating Medicare costs?

“One always has the option of reading the document, instead of just thumping on it day after day while dramatically proclaiming that no one knows what’s between the front and the back covers. I’m pretty sure democrats will read the details of any alternative republican proposals–assuming that they ever get around to putting them down on paper.”

It’s like you’re in some sort of drug-induced fog. My little jab was at how NO ONE was even allowed to read the original bill that you hold so dear. And yet, it was SO important to present SOMETHING to PrezZero that the democrat morons said “sure!” and voted for something they knew nothing about.

Well … actually, the House never voted on it directly. Had Peloski even attempted to do so, it would have never passed, so they dreamed up this “deem and pass” nonsense to skip around a direct vote. Only a parliamentary maneuver enabled this turd to slip out of Pelosi’s political anus.

Thus, my suggestion that we return the favor in 2011 and don’t let the democraps see, smell, touch, or lick it before the vote is taken. Fair’s fair.

You know, I’ve often wondered why if this bill is so important to the populace, that SO many lives will be saved by it, then why the hell won’t it go into effect until 2014? Your side is willing to let all those people die between now and then? Why?

Doug, hi, yes, they don’t seems to care about the ones who are sick at this time,
they really goof on that ,

Looks like Greg, much like the no longer present B-Rob is too scared to answer, lol. I expected as much.

@Doug � You said:

You know, I�ve often wondered why if this bill is so important to the populace, that SO many lives will be saved by it, then why the hell won�t it go into effect until 2014? Your side is willing to let all those people die between now and then? Why?

Excellent point!

So how about it, Greg? What say you?