Fix Health Care Policy

Five Health Care Takeaways from CBO’s Report

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Budget and Economic Outlook for 2013–2023 today. Here are five major takeaways:

1)      Health care entitlement spending is bypassing all other spending. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program will be greater than all other spending—including Social Security and defense spending: “Spending for major health care programs will be nearly 5 percent of GDP [gross domestic product] in 2013, and such spending is projected to grow rapidly when provisions of [Obamacare] are fully implemented by middecade, reaching 6.2 percent of GDP in 2023.”

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: Congressional Budget Office, entitlement spending, Medicaid, Medicare, ObamaCare, report, subsidies

Presidential Debate Prep: Understanding Obamacare’s $716 Billion in Cuts to Medicare

As the Medicare debate intensifies, there still seems to be popular confusion regarding the $716 billion in “savings” from Obamacare’s Medicare payment cuts. Let us end the confusion.

Which Parts of Medicare Will Be Cut?

In Obamacare, the payment cuts are across-the-board cuts (modifications of Medicare’s complex payment formulas) made throughout the bulk of the Medicare program. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), these cuts will decrease Medicare spending by an estimated $716 billion between 2013 and 2022.

The money is cut from hospital services, Medicare Advantage, skilled nursing services, hospice services, and other Medicare services. To be clear, the cuts do not target individual institutions or medical organizations suspected of waste, fraud, or abuse. (continues below chart)

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: $716 billion, Congressional Budget Office, Medicare, Medicare Advantage cuts, presidential debate, spending

Obamacare’s 18 New Tax Hikes

Not only did the President and his partners in Congress take $716 billion out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare, but they also raise taxes by $836.3 billion to pay for it, with $36.3 billion hitting Americans in 2013 alone. Here’s the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation‘s (JCT) updated cost of the Obamacare tax hikes and penalties.

To read about more of Obamacare’s negative effects, click here.

Tags: Cadillac tax, Congressional Budget Office, employer mandate, Individual Mandate, Joint Committee on Taxation, Medicare cuts, ObamaCare, tanning tax, tax hikes

Obamacare Robs Medicare of $716 Billion to Fund Itself

Last week, a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report updated the amount of money Obamacare robs out of Medicare from $500 billion to a whopping $716 billion between 2013 and 2022.

According to the CBO, the payment cuts in Medicare include:

• A $260 billion payment cut for hospital services.
• A $39 billion payment cut for skilled nursing services.
• A $17 billion payment cut for hospice services.
• A $66 billion payment cut for home health services.
• A $33 billion payment cut for all other services.
• A $156 billion cut in payment rates in Medicare Advantage (MA); $156 billion is before considering interactions with other provisions. The House Ways and Means Committee was able to include interactions with other provisions, estimating the cuts to MA to be even higher, coming in at $308 billion.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: $500 billion cuts, Congressional Budget Office, hospital services, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, ObamaCare, rob

CBO’s Estimates of Obamacare, Revisited

Some apologists for Obamacare are trying to tout recent analyses from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as confirming once again that the health law will cut projected future budget deficits.

But CBO’s recent analyses—including updated projections of the costs of the new entitlement spending in the so-called exchanges and some simulations on employer dumping scenarios—basically say nothing that wasn’t already said when the agency issued its original cost estimates for the law in March 2010.

It is certainly true that CBO projected in 2010 and again this month that the new law would, at least on paper, reduce the federal government’s budget deficit modestly over its first two decades. But that assessment has always rested on a series of omissions, gimmicks, double-counting of savings, and implausible assumptions that also have not changed since the law was enacted in 2010. When the imaginary “savings” is stripped out of the accounting, Obamacare is exposed as the epic budget buster that it is. That, too, hasn’t changed since March 2010.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: Congressional Budget Office, expensive, higher cost, new analysis, new entitlement spending, ObamaCare

Obamacare: Higher Taxes, More Uninsured, Says CBO

On March 13, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) updated its score of Obamacare, announcing that the program is $48 billion cheaper than in its previous 2011 score.

The primary reason for this change is that more individuals will lose their employer-provided coverage than originally anticipated, and the government will collect $99 billion more in taxes and penalties. CBO also finds that there are more uninsured individuals.

In short, this new CBO update continues the trend of Obamacare becoming increasingly expensive and decreasingly effective with each new scoring update.

In this round, CBO announced that the individual mandate penalties will increase by one-third, or $11 billion, as more individuals choose not to purchase insurance. This is especially surprising since CBO also estimates that health insurance premiums will be cheaper in the next decade. Thus, even with cheaper premiums, fewer people will choose to acquire insurance.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: Congressional Budget Office, more penalties, Obamacare score, taxes, uninsured individuals

Medicare Advantage Is Living Up to Its Name

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released a report that reviewed 10 Medicare demonstrations designed with the intention of reducing spending and improving quality of care. Unfortunately, the demonstrations did not produce the desired results.

The CBO report concluded, “The results of the demonstrations illustrate the challenges of developing, implementing, and evaluating policies that reduce Medicare expenditures while improving or maintaining quality of care.” However, Heritage policy analyst Kathryn Nix has analyzed research that shows that the answer to the challenge is right under everyone’s nose: the private market.

Nix explains that private health plans participating in Medicare Advantage (MA) are making strides in what Congress has tried—and failed—to achieve in traditional Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) for decades. Competition among private plans has maintained patient satisfaction, lowered costs, and increased the quality of care. Success is obvious and abundant in the MA program.  (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: competition, Congressional Budget Office, fee-for-service, lowered costs, Medicare Advantage, private market

Criticism of McKinsey Survey on Employer Health Coverage Falls Short

The recent McKinsey survey showing that 30 percent of employers would drop coverage shouldn’t be controversial. Economists have consistently shown how an employer mandate will negatively affect employment and wages. In fact, even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concede such affects.

Answering critics’ calls, McKinsey released the details of its survey three weeks ago, showing that their survey methodology was sound. The survey included a large sample size, representative industries, respondents directly involved in the decision-making process regarding health benefits, and questions/information presented in a neutral manner. Nonetheless, critics—including the White House and Senate Democrats—have continued to vehemently criticize the report, calling it an “outlier.”   (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: Congressional Budget Office, drop coverage, employers, McKinsey survey, methodology, ObamaCare

CBO Report Shows, Without Reform, the Future of Medicare Ain’t Pretty

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released its annual Long-Term Budget Outlook, which highlights the effects of existing policy on the federal budget. The verdict: The current trajectory is “unsustainable.”

Growing federal health care spending is a major driver of future deficits. As CBO explains, “Spending for health care in the United States has been growing faster than the economy for many years, posing a challenge not only for the federal government’s two major health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, but also for state and local governments and the private sector.” The report shows that the outlook is grimmer than ever, despite the vaunted “deficit reduction” claims of those in Congress who voted for Obamacare.  (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: Congressional Budget Office, long-term budget outlook, Medicare, ObamaCare, repeal the law, unsustainable

Another Good Swing At Defunding Obamacare—But Not A Hit

Once again the U.S. House plans to take another whack Tuesday at defunding Obamacare—although the Senate and White House are poised to protect the funding.

The bill scheduled for a vote, HR 1213, would repeal the automatic funding that Obamacare provides for federally-dictated insurance exchanges, the mechanisms to sell the re-fashioned and federally-approved insurance policies. And while the bill does not repeal the requirement that each state either establish such an exchange or have the feds do it for them, billions of taxpayer dollars could be saved if the House bill had a chance to become law.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates savings of $14.6-billion over ten years, but the amount is inexact because Obamacare placed no limit on how much would be spent. The Secretary of Health and Human Services was given a blank check for that purpose. It’s just one part of the overall $105-billion slush fund in automatic spending under Obamacare. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: Congressional Budget Office, health care costs, ObamaCare, taxpayer dollars repeal the law