The High Cost of ObamaCare
Americans wisely rejected HillaryCare. ObamaCare is the same poison, different bottle.
Originally Posted At The National Review
By Lawrence A. Hunter
June 17, 2009
President Obama spoke to the American Medical Association yesterday and repeated the same platitudes and promises he has been uttering ever since the presidential campaign. What he did not explain, however, is how he intends to square the circle of providing universal, top-quality health care for everyone without imposing health-care rationing, without raising taxes on the middle class, and without blowing another trillion-dollar hole in the budget.
He did not explain it because he can’t. That circle cannot be squared; it’s a logical impossibility. Couldn’t be done by Hillary; can’t be done by Obama.
Americans must understand: ObamaCare equals HillaryCare; same poison, different bottle.
Back when HillaryCare was under consideration by Congress, I was minority staff director of the congressional Joint Economic Committee. I co-authored a report titled “A Billion Dollars a Day,” referring to the true cost (i.e., after all the unrealistic assumptions were discounted) of President Clinton’s plan to nationalize health care and turn it over to Hillary to run. Congress rejected HillaryCare, in part because the price tag was so astronomical.
Fifteen years later, a new president and a new Congress, this one controlled by the president’s party, are trying once again to turn health care over to the government to run.
Depending upon which estimate one accepts, the Obama program is projected to cost between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion during the first ten years of operation. That works out to an average annual cost of $100 billion to $150 billion, or somewhere between $274 million and $411 million a day.
What’s wrong with this picture? The Obama administration has set its aim just as high as the Clinton administration, and yet this estimate is only 27 percent to 41 percent of what we projected HillaryCare would cost. The Obama figure is even more eye-popping when one factors in the inflation we have had in the intervening 15 years.
According to the special Consumer Price Index that measures medical inflation, the cost of health care has gone up by 80 percent since HillaryCare was on the table. The billion dollars a day our report projected in 1993 would amount to $1.8 billion a day in 2009, or $658 billion a year — $6.6 trillion for the first decade. And that does not take population growth into consideration.
How on earth can the Obama administration claim it is going to restrain the cost of nationalizing 17 percent of the U.S. economy? First, much of the increased cost will be forced on workers and their employers surreptitiously through mandates and regulations that keep the cost from showing up in the federal budget — call it AIG accounting.
Second, administration officials speak sonorously of “cost control.” One of the “cost-containment” schemes the president spent a lot of time talking about in his AMA speech is centralizing and computerizing health information. Yet, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that health-information technology as provided for in the recently enacted stimulus bill would reduce health-care spending by only about 0.3 percent. Therefore, the main source of cost savings will have to be direct rationing of health care through an innocuous-sounding concept called “comparative effectiveness research” — which will allow bureaucrats to delay and deny care on the grounds it is not “effective” — and indirect rationing through squeezing the reimbursement of doctors and hospitals.
One thing we learned from the Medicare experience is that the original estimates of radical new government programs are vastly understated because of government’s inability to control program costs and the impossibility of imposing price controls (by whatever name) on an entire economy-wide industry. But price controls and spending caps it will be, just as it would have been with HillaryCare, followed by health-care rationing, just as it has been with Medicare. And although these bureaucratic machinations will harm people, they won’t appreciably hold down costs.
At its inception in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion a year. At that time, the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives projected “conservatively” that the program would cost approximately $12 billion a year by 1990. In 1990, the cost of Medicare was actually $107 billion — nine times greater than the Ways and Means estimate.
One might argue that no matter the price tag, it would be worth it to achieve universal health-care coverage. But will Obama & Co. actually achieve this Holy Grail? Not even close. According to the CBO, even assuming Congress enacts an individual health-care mandate (i.e., a requirement that everybody in the United States obtain insurance), somewhere between a fourth and a third of the uninsured still would not have coverage.
It may be impossible to project the cost of next-gen HillaryCare with precision (although I am willing to bet it will come in at about a trillion dollars a year). But one thing we can say with confidence is that the Obama administration’s current estimates are so far askew from historical experience, so at variance with past estimates for similar programs, and based on so many dodgy assumptions that they are quite simply unbelievable.
|
|
Urgent Petition
|
Sign the petition to stop Social Security Cuts and send a fax to every Member of Congress demanding they cut other spending, NOT SOCIAL SECURITY.
Share This Petition
|
Recent News
Friday, May 18, 2012
Congressional Republicans are back up to their old shenanigans on ObamaCare. Politico reveals that Republicans would try to replicate popular parts of Obama’s health care law if the Supreme Court overturns the law this summer.
Read Full Story
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Source: ABC News
The Food and Drug Administration has warned doctors to watch for fractures of the upper thigh bone in patients taking several popular drugs designed to prevent hip fractures and fight osteoprothesis. The FDA warns that Fosamax and Boniva in particular, if taken unnecessarily or for too long, may actually be causing the bone fractures they are prescribed to prevent. Watch ABC News video.
Read Full Story
Thursday, May 17, 2012
 Exit Not An Option In Chuck Schumer's America. New York Senator Chuck Schumer has introduced the Fugitive Taxpayer Act of 2012 to re-impose taxes on expatriates after they flee the United States and take up residence in a foreign country. Proposal also would impose a mandatory 30 percent tax on the capital gains of anybody who renounces their U.S. citizenship and would bar such individuals from ever reentering the United States again.
Read Full Story
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Whether President Obama gets his second term or Romney enters the Oval Office, there’s a third candidate no one’s paying much attention to, and that candidate is guaranteed to be the one clear winner of election 2012: the U.S. military and our ever-surging national security state.
Read Full Story
Friday, May 11, 2012
According to the New York Federal Reserve, two million US seniors age 60 and over have student loan debt, on which they owe a collective $36.5 billion; and 11.2 percent of this debt is in default. 4.2 percent of all student loan debt is held by people over the age of 60, and that share grows with each passing year.
Read Full Story
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Across the U.S. economy, anxiety is rising about the potential for widespread disruptions after the November election, when a lame-duck Congress will have barely two months to resolve a grinding standoff over taxes and spending.
Read Full Story
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Two-thirds of Republicans and nine in 10 Democrats polled support making immediate cuts to the military across the board -- a position at odds with the leaderships of both political parties.
Read Full Story
Monday, May 7, 2012
Video revealing the circumstances of how a mentally ill homeless man in Fullerton, Calif. died last July was finally published Monday, revealing a stunningly brutal police assault that left Kelly Thomas bleeding, broken and near death.
Read Full Story
Monday, May 7, 2012
The number of people with jobs declined for the second month in a row, falling by 169,000 in April after easing by 31,000 in March. This means that there were 200,000 fewer Americans with jobs in April than there were in February. Additionally, the percentage of working-age adults who either have jobs or are looking for work, fell to 63.6%, which is the lowest level since December 1981.
Read Full Story
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
In November 2010, a police lieutenant from Parma, Ohio, asked Vanguard Defense Industries if the Texas-based drone manufacturer could mount a “grenade launcher and/or 12-gauge shotgun” on its ShadowHawk drone for U.S. law enforcement agencies. The answer was yes.
Read Full Story
Read All Recent News
Get in the Know Now
Get SSI Email Alerts
Social Networks
Action Center
|
