CBO Report: House Bill Reduces Medicare Benefits

I want to start this one by reminding you of two facts. First, the major assurances we get about ObamaCare is that it won't increase the deficit, it will decrease costs, and medicare benefits won't be reduced. Second, House Republicans wanted to hold the vote on the House bill until the CBO report was issued. Keep those two facts in mind.

The CBO report on the House ObamaCare bill has been issued. It finds that medicare spending would be slashed, benefits would be curtailed, and many doctors/hospitals would stop taking Medicare patients.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33946165/ns/politics-washington_post

A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending — one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama's proposed overhaul of the nation's health-care system — would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.

The report, requested by House Republicans, found that Medicare cuts contained in the health package approved by the House on Nov. 7 are likely to prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether.

Congress could intervene to avoid such an outcome, but "so doing would likely result in significantly smaller actual savings" than is currently projected, according to the analysis by the chief actuary for the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid. That would wipe out a big chunk of the financing for the health-care reform package, which is projected to cost $1.05 trillion over the next decade.

And remember when supporters casually dismissed fears that the influx of new patients would swamp the system? The CBO report actually strengthens the position of ObamaCare opponents.

More generally, the report questions whether the country's network of doctors and hospitals would be able to cope with the effects of a reform package expected to add more than 30 million people to the ranks of the insured, many of them through Medicaid, the public health program for the poor.

In the face of greatly increased demand for services, providers are likely to charge higher fees or take patients with better-paying private insurance over Medicaid recipients, "exacerbating existing access problems" in that program, according to the report from Richard S. Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Though the report does not attempt to quantify that impact, Foster writes: "It is reasonable to expect that a significant portion of the increased demand for Medicaid would not be realized."

So when you hear the bland reassurances, remember the reality.

In its most recent analysis of the House bill, the CBO noted that Medicare spending per beneficiary would have to grow at roughly half the rate it has over the past two decades to meet the measure's savings targets, a dramatic reduction that many budget and health policy experts consider unrealistic.

"This report confirms what virtually every independent expert has been saying: [House] Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi's health-care bill will increase costs, not decrease them," said Rep. Dave Camp (Mich.), the senior Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee. "This is a stark warning to every Republican, Democrat and independent worried about the financial future of this nation."

ObamaCare will take a decent health care system with some flaws and turn it into a government-run disaster on wheels. Once again I must say, this is NOT change I can believe in.