One of the selling points for the current health care legislation is that it'll reduce the deficit by $132 billion dollars over ten years while insuring 30 million more Americans. How might such blessings be achieved?
Randall Hoven at American Thinker does the math. It turns out that the Democrat plan assumes cuts of about $483 billion dollars from medicare, medicaid, and SCHIP. In other words, the Democrats are going to take benefits away from the poor, the young and the elderly in order to pay for their extravagance.
Moreover, the plan will raise costs for businesses which will put more people, mostly marginal employees, out of work which will in turn hurt the poor even more.
Here's Hoven:
You get "deficit reduction" by cutting Medicare and raising taxes by more than $1 trillion: Medicare and other program cuts of $483 billion, and an extra $521 billion in new taxes and fees.
The cuts include cuts across Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program: $186 billion from permanent reductions in payment rates for fee-for-service, $118 billion for payment rate reductions based on bids submitted, and $43 billion from reducing payments to hospitals that serve low-income patients. In all, it's a $483-billion cut from Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP.
Hoven then goes on to explain briefly the unfunded mandates contained in the bill:
... the legislation would require individuals to obtain acceptable health insurance coverage...
The legislation also would penalize medium-sized and large employers that did not offer health insurance...
The legislation would impose a number of mandates, including requirements on issuers of health insurance, standards governing health information, and nutrition labeling requirements.
The bill still contains a provision that's essentially a pathway to a "public option:"
[This legislation would replace] a 'public plan' that would be run by the Department of Health and Human Services with 'multi-state' plans that would be offered under contract with the Office of Personnel Management ...
And even contains a path to the dreaded "death panels:"
The legislation also would establish an Independent Payment Advisory Board, which would be required, under certain circumstances, to recommend changes to the Medicare program to limit the rate of growth in that program's spending. Those recommendations would go into effect automatically unless blocked by subsequent legislative action.
I hope you are comforted. When that "advisory" board says no expensive cancer drug for you -- cheap pain pills only -- you can still hope that "subsequent legislative action" is taken to reverse that decision. That is to say that the only thing that prevents the "advisory board" from being a "death panel" is the hope that Congress will override it.
Here's a question we might all ask ourselves: If a Republican had made a proposal that would cut medicare and profoundly impact the poor and children would we favor it or oppose it? If we would oppose cutting benefits to these groups had those cuts been suggested by Republicans then should we not oppose them just as vigorously if they been proposed by Democrats?
RLC
