Repealing ‘Obamacare’ Would Explode Debt, Says Government Auditor

[stockholmer]

23. a couple of problems with the article

Last edited Wed Apr 4, 2012, 07:59 AM - Edit history (1)

1. The title is hyperbolic (and taken directly from a White House staffer's Tweet https://twitter.com/#!/jesseclee44/status/187204058124259328 , so much for balanced journalism from the 4th estate) : It is a 1% of GDP difference in 18 years, and this is if all of the assumptions that the White House is predicting hold true. As you will see below, even the GAO, along with the CBO and the IMF do not think they will.

"If “Obamacare” is implemented as intended, and other measures, such as automatic payment cuts to Medicare physicians, take effect, “spending on Medicare and Medicaid grows from 5 percent of GDP in 2010 to over 7 percent by 2030.”

By contrast, if Congress overrides those provisions, “[s]pending on health care grows much more rapidly under this more pessimistic set of assumptions,” according to the report. “Absent changes to these programs, spending on Medicare and Medicaid under the Alternative simulation grows to over 8 percent of GDP by 2030.”

2. From the article itself:

GAO doesn’t isolate PPACA’s stand-alone contribution to long-term budget consolidation.

Nor does the article take into account the GAO's, CBO's, and the IMF's http://blog-pfm.imf.org/pfmblog/2010/05/imf-fiscal-monitor-navigating-the-fiscal-challenges-ahead.html pessimism in regards to many of the cost containment mechanisms.

Although the GAO's report says that

“several provisions of PPACA were designed to control the growth of health care costs,”

it also notes the existence of

“significant uncertainties surrounding the growth of health care costs” and cautions that Medicare’s “Trustees, CBO, and the CMS Actuary have expressed concerns about the sustainability of certain health care cost-control measures over the long term.”

Also, from the GAO Report:

[The Trustees, CBO, and Medicare’s actuary] have also questioned whether a provision in PPACA that would restrain spending growth by reducing the payment rates for certain Medicare services based on productivity gains observed throughout the economy is sustainable over the long term. According to CMS, health care productivity gains have historically been small, and may be difficult to achieve in the future due to several factors, including the labor intensive nature of the industry and the individual customization of treatments in many cases.

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3. Some further details from Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all on how administration memos reveal the fudging of numbers:

According to a reported internal White House memo dated December 20, 2009, White House advisers had explicitly recommended to President Obama that he give up on “honest budgeting”—in particular, that he “fiddle” with the health law’s costs in order to hide its costs. The president approved the move.

In the December 20th memo, they resorted to gimmickry. In his first budget, Obama had prided himself on “honest budgeting,” declining to employ the fanciful assumptions that the previous Administration had used to hide the costs of government. On disaster relief, for example, he had estimated that the government would need twenty billion dollars a year, a figure based on the statistical likelihood of major disasters requiring federal aid. Now Obama’s aides reminded him that Congress had ignored his “ ‘honest budgeting’ approach,” and perhaps they should, too. They proposed “$5 billion per year for disaster costs.” Obama drew another check mark. The White House could also save billions by fiddling with the way it presented savings from Obama’s health-care-reform bill. Check. [bold added]

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SINGLE-PAYER is the only way out of the US's dystopian health care system.

The PPACA was always a bad idea, and a further corporatist takeover of what should considered a basic human right to universal health care.