From Jamie Dupree -
Over the weekend, both parties battled it out over the latest report on health care plans from Democrats, written by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a non-partisan arm of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The report said the House passed health bill would increase spending on health care by $289 billion over ten years, which goes against what Democrats have been arguing about the bill’s overall impact.
“With the exception of the proposed reductions in Medicare payment updates for institutional providers, the provisions of H.R. 3962 would not have a significant impact on future health care cost growth rates,” said a final bullet point on page 17.
You can download the report and read it for yourself at http://is.gd/4VQQ2
Then, Chief Actuary Richard Foster delivered a real gut kick to the Democratic plans, saying “the longer-term viability of the Medicare update reductions is doubtful.”
That means plans in the bill to cut costs in Medicare probably won’t occur, because certain groups will complain and the Congress will then go back on the proposed cuts, just like we have seen in the reductions in Medicare payments for Doctors, the so-called “Doc Fix”.
In case you didn’t understand that, the report repeats it in a variety of ways.
“We estimate that most of the provisions of H.R. 3962 that were designed, in part, to reduce the rate of growth in health care costs would have a relatively small savings impact.”
If you look at the table on page 2 of the report, which details the ten years budget numbers on the bill, it estimates $2.1 billion in savings over ten years from “Comparative effectiveness research, prevention and wellness, fraud and abuse and administrative simplification.”
That only confirms the thought that when you hear politicians talk about saving big time money from ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ – don’t believe it.
Look for Senate Republicans to be all over this report as the Senate returns to work today, as they try to make the argument that Democrats are going to spend, spend, spend, and not save money in the long term.
Democrats will still make the argument – and it is legitimate according to the Congressional Budget Office – that their plan does not raise the federal deficit.
The problem is that one big argument Democrats have made is that they would “bend the cost curve” for medical expenses downward. This report raises serious questions about that.
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1 Comment
November 17, 2009 at 10:14 am
In other words, a bill that would provide insurance protection to almost every single American family would only cost $29 billion a year. And that’s the total social cost, not the cost to the federal government. The House bill actually reduces the federal deficit.
Of course, $20 billion per year still sounds like a lot of money, but it is:
• A little more than half of the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Secuity in President Bush’s last budget;
• A small percentage of what we have spent on the Iraq War;
• Less than one percent of what we spend on health care in total.
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Of course, we should do everything we can to “bend the curve” of health care spending. That is why the conference version of the legislation should adopt the cost-savings measures contained in the Senate Finance Committee bill, particularly the excise tax on “Cadillac” health plans and the Medicare reimbursement commission.