Reform Or Making Things Worse?
The minute people start reading the CBO’s report on what the Senate’s health care bill does to their insurance premium is the minute the people will revolt. Here’s what the Hill Magazine is reporting:
Individual insurance premiums would increase by an average of 10 percent or more, according to an analysis of the Senate healthcare bill.
The long-awaited report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) also concluded that subsidies provided by the legislation would make coverage cheaper for those who qualify.
The report, issued in the form of a letter to Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), will provide both Democrats and Republicans with ammunition as the Senate begins amending the healthcare bill on Monday.
“CBO and JCT estimate that the average premium per person covered (including dependents) for new nongroup policies would be about 10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than the average premium for nongroup coverage in that same year under current law. About half of those enrollees would receive government subsidies that would reduce their costs well below the premiums that would be charged for such policies under current law,” the report says.
Those enrollees that get subsidized insurance premiums would either effect a tax hike to taxpayers of all stripes or the subsidies would just bet added to the annual deficits. As I’ve said before, they wouldn’t be self-sustaining. The subsidies would just hide a major deficiency in the Democrats’ legislation.
It’s time that the Democrats stopped this insanity and got to work on fixing health care.
I’ll ask a few simple questions and see if you think this constitutes reform:
- Is it reform when health insurance premiums continue increasing?
- Is it reform when taxes are raised by hundreds of billions of dollars?
- Is it reform when the deficit will increase by half a trillion dollars? (That’s what will happen when you add in the doctor fix of $210,000,000,000 and you don’t cut Medicare by $470,000,000,000.)
- Is it reform when many costs are shifted from the federal government onto states in the form of an underfunded mandate for Medicaid expansion?
This is what Washington thinks constitutes reform. Here in the real world, though, it’s what’s called making the situation worse.
Technorati Tags: Reforms, Tax Increases, Insurance Premium Increases, JCT, CBO, Subsidies, Deficits, Medicare Cuts, Harry Reid, President Obama, Democrats
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
November 30th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
“Individual insurance premiums would increase by an average of 10 percent or more, according to an analysis of the Senate healthcare bill.”
That “10%” is extremely misleading and in fact probably totally wrong. What will happen, the premiums will “probably” be 10% - 13% less than the market premiums AT THE TIME (2016). Consider that market premiums will probably rise an average of 8% - 12% each year until then. So you’re talking a major increase, not a piddly 10% increase from TODAY’s premiums.