Stephanopoulos: "You Reject That It’s A Tax Increase? " Obama: "I Absolutely Reject That Notion"

[Igel]

13. That's the claim.

That's not what happened in the one experiment.

One claim is that by having health care emergency room visits will plummet, reducing costs; the general health of the population will increase and make up in greater productivity what the health care costs.

The reality is that emergency room visits decreased by a trivial amount. The increase in productivity attributed to the new law was trivial. President Obama said that he wouldn't sign it if it increased the deficit by even "one dime", but that was over and above a budget projection that already included a rather large deficit. The idea was that instead of a deficit for one reason we'd simply repurpose the deficit. The consequences of the repurposing were decreed by law: The decrease in costs were stipulated and therefore it was incumbent upon the CBO to use them. In the one experiment, costs actually increased. A lot. The CBO was implicitly critical by saying in detail its assumptions for its projection and that it didn't need to agree with them.

In the experiment it was found that enough people went to physicians to sharply increase the demand for doctors. This was satisfied by hiring doctors from out of state, and still the average length of wait time for an appointment more than tripled.

I figure that the response must be that by 1/1/2014 we triple or quadruple the amount of doctors that complete their 2-year program and their year of residency, plus any fellowships to make them specialists. That's manageable--that gives us 18 months or so for a mere 32 months' worth of training.