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Will the real 10 year cost of ObamaCare be over $6 trillion?

Meadmaker said:
Right now, I pay for health insurance. Under Obamacare, I will pay for health insurance.

Will my health insurance premiums become government spending after the law passes?



Right now, there are people in the United States who do not get health care because they have not been able or have not chosen to purchase health insurance. That has to change. Any suggestions for doing so would be welcome, but only Obama and the Democrats are putting forward those suggestions.
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Yes, you will still buy health insurance under Obamacare. Except now you will be forced by government to buy it. That may not be Constitutional.

Yes your premiums will be government spending and you will start paying taxes now for a program that won't start for at least 3 years. Where does that money go???

there are people in the United States who do not get health care because they have not been able or have not chosen to purchase health insurance. That has to change
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Under Obamacare there will still be at least 10 to16 million people without insurance.


Where is the change??
 
Darat said:
Given your set-up isn't that what this bill represents?
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By our "set-up", I believe Darat means "Representative Democracy" and he is absolutely correct. We had an election in which this very topic was one of the big issues. We elected the people to make these decisions and most of the people we elected were for some sort of health care reform.

We DID make this decision.
 
The Painter said:
Yes your premiums will be government spending
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So I'll be doing exactly what I do now, but right now it is private spending whereas later it will be government spending. That does seem to be what Cato's "cost" numbers imply.

Under Obamacare there will still be at least 10 to16 million people without insurance.
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So the bill isn't perfect. What's your point?


As for the OP, it asks if Obama and co. are lying by not stating the true costs of the bill. First, I don't think it is lying to exclude the costs that I pay now and will continue to pay in health insurance premiums, so the source material is ridiculous. Second, this is a sufficiently large change that no one knows the true cost of this bill, so any estimate will be guaranteed be inaccurate. People will try to spin the numbers in all sorts of ways to show that one side or the other is "lying". Anyone who claims to know the true cost of the bill is lying.

We know that eventually, people will get care that they don't get now. That's going to be costly. Meanwhile, there are two sources of nonmedical expense that burdens our health care system today. There is unnecessary administrative overhead, which in the US system largely consists of all those people who make their living processing and preparing insurance claims, and there are legal costs. Obama claims that the bill will be addressing the first part, providing significant savings.

Personally, from what I've seen, I don't believe it. From what I've seen, it doesn't looke to have enough changes to outweigh the extra cost of additional care. However, I don't know that. Moreover, I don't really care all that much. If there were two proposals on the table to get everyone covered, I might pay attention to which one was better, but there aren't. There are a couple of slight variations, neither of which is adequate to do what ought to be done, but both of which are better than nothing. It's a start.
 
Meadmaker said:
Under Obamacare there will still be at least 10 to16 million people without insurance.
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So the bill isn't perfect.
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But it could have been better. It could have covered everyone. I find it a little disingenuous for those railing against universal health care to complain about about the neutered bill not covering x number of people.
 
it doesn't looke to have enough changes to outweigh the extra cost of additional care
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That's the point. All this is, is the government getting its fingers in the pie and taking their vig. It's a bad program


I find it a little disingenuous for those railing against universal health care to complain about about the neutered bill not covering x number of people.
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I find it disingenuous that those railing for change could support a plan that is the same old thing.
 
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Upchurch said:
We elected the people to make these decisions and most of the people we elected were for some sort of health care reform.
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You mean like the people we elected to make "these" decisions in 2003 when most of the people we elected were for "some sort of action in Iraq"?

You could use that claim to justify everything that congress has ever done- since congress is elected by the people make "these" decisions and nothing ever passed congress unless most of the people were for it.
 
Bob Klase said:
You mean like the people we elected to make "these" decisions in 2003 when most of the people we elected were for "some sort of action in Iraq"?

You could use that claim to justify everything that congress has ever done- since congress is elected by the people make "these" decisions and nothing ever passed congress unless most of the people were for it.
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Well, you could if Bush's 2000 campaign hadn't explicitly included "no nation building" and "reducing foreign deployment".

Health care was very much a part of the 2008 campaign and although the issue has evolved some, people are still pretty much on the same position they campaigned from.
 
As I told someone the other day, if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free. Obamacare is a bad idea, which is why they are trying to ram it through Congress before people figure it out. Glad CATO is running the numbers, since Congress can't be bothered.
 
Yes, they've been ramming it through way to fast! How are we to know what's going on? They've been ramming it through, piece by piece for months now.

Seriously, the arguments against 'Obamacare' (which I take to mean 'healthcare reform that I don't like and I also don't like Obama, so I'm going to make up a silly name combining the two') are getting repetitive and silly.

Oh no! It's going to cost money. Ummm, dept! National dept! Death panels! Scientifically sound restrictions! AHHHHH! AAAAAHAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
 
carlitos said:
As I told someone the other day, if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free. Obamacare is a bad idea, which is why they are trying to ram it through Congress before people figure it out. Glad CATO is running the numbers, since Congress can't be bothered.
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But CATO is not “running the numbers”. CATO is distorting the numbers. They just added up everything that might conceivably be considered a “cost”, systematically ignored anything that might be either revenue or savings, and declared that the program will “cost” six trillion dollars. It creates a nice banner headline, and it might even be technically true, but it is obvious that CATO and the GOP are trying to get people to believe that the net cost is six trillion, rather than the gross cost, which is what they are reporting.

They believe that if they just say “cost six trillion dollars” loud enough and often enough, they can sucker voters into beliving it and we can have another decade of healthcare industry pocketlining.

Meanwhile, the CBO says the program will actually reduce the deficit.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Again, this talk of these reform bills "costing" anything is misleading.
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It matters not who is paying, medical care costs money.
The CBO says that both plans will result in a net deficit reduction.
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Linky?

And of course counting benefits paid out by insurance companies from money received as premiums as "government spending" is silly.
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Agreed. GAAP would be a nice place for people to agree on how to discuss the money issue ...
 
tyr_13 said:
Yes, they've been ramming it through way to fast! How are we to know what's going on? They've been ramming it through, piece by piece for months now.

Seriously, the arguments against 'Obamacare' (which I take to mean 'healthcare reform that I don't like and I also don't like Obama, so I'm going to make up a silly name combining the two') are getting repetitive and silly.

Oh no! It's going to cost money. Ummm, dept! National dept! Death panels! Scientifically sound restrictions! AHHHHH! AAAAAHAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
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Agreed. (Although use of the term does serve as a rather convenient and easily identifiable indicator of one with whom an argument is probably not going to be worth your time.)
 
carlitos said:
As I told someone the other day, if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free. Obamacare is a bad idea, which is why they are trying to ram it through Congress before people figure it out.
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Yes, we've *only* had 5 months of debate on it. The full text of both bills is available on the web. They're definitely trying to sneak something through before anyone knows what it is! :rolleyes:

Glad CATO is running the numbers, since Congress can't be bothered.
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The CBO did the numbers already. For the record, the net effect on the Federal Budget of both major bills would be to decrease the deficit.

Guess you can't be bothered with reality.
 
Darth Rotor said:
It matters not who is paying, medical care costs money.
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But the claim by Cato is that insurance premiums are the same as government spending. For the purpose of this analysis, it does matter who is spending it. ETA: In fact, the only point Cato is making is that Democrats are hiding government spending by improperly claiming it's not government spending. Who is doing the spending is exactly what's at issue.

Linky?
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Well, it was all over the news when Reid unveiled the Senate plan (I believe there was at least one thread on this forum discussing the CBO's numbers), but here it is from the horse's mouth:
CBO said:
CBO and JCT estimate that, on balance, the direct spending and revenue effects of enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would yield a net reduction in federal deficits of $130 billion over the 2010-2019 period (see Table 1).
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PDF of CBO report on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

And here's the estimate on the House Bill:

CBO said:
CBO and the staff of JCT now estimate that, on balance, the direct spending and revenue effects of enacting H.R. 3962, incorporating the manager’s amendment, would yield a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $109 billion over the 2010-2019 period (see Table 1).
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Linky.

ETA: Even though Fox News often confuses "Senate Democrats" with the CBO, they reported the same figures when the story broke a few weeks ago. (Fox editorial passed off as a news article.)
 
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So. . . to answer the question, using the word "cost" the way most of us think of it, the real net cost of either of these bills (assuming the final version isn't too much more watered down) is about negative $100 billion over ten years.
 
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