Nemo me impune lacessit

No one provokes me with impunity

____________________________________

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Article 1, Section 9, Constitution of the United States

If this is the law of the land...why in a republic (little r) and as republicans, do we allow mere POLITICIANS to the right to use a "title of office" for the rest of their lives as if it were de facto a patent of nobility. Because, as republicans, this should NOT be the case...just saying...

The Vail Spot's Amazon Store

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Real Cost of Baucus Bill $2 Trillion dollars

So, it's all smoke and mirrors. Tax and spend, and tax some more. Max Baucus tells us his bill will SAVE taxpayers money, but the reality is that taxes will ultimately rise along with the cost of your health insurance. The company I work for has already said that if a "public option" (which is no option at all) is passes, then they will terminate their in house "self-insurance" plan. They don't want to pay the taxes and fees that will be laid upon them for supplying a "Cadillac" plan. So, I'll get shoved onto a public option whether I want to or not. Additionally, my family physician has already sent out letters that he will not accept "public option" insurance...so I won't get to keep my doctor either...So, who lied in all this and why is Congress trying to screw the rest of the country as hard as they are? Who really will benefit from this series of plans? Not the country at large...but some special interest surely will.

The thing that steams me the most though, is that in EVERY SINGLE PLAN Congress and all Federal Employees are specifically exempt from the provisions of these various schemes they've put forward. Its not like they'll be covered by them. So why should they care what happens to the rest of us. Do you really want DMV/Postal Service like health care? That's what's in store. Ask anyone who has dealt with the VA Medical Service, or gone to a VA Hospital. That is what this Congress is trying to foist on this country. Substandard health care.

Under Baucus' plan, only 11% more people will be covered. For this, they want to wreck the health insurance for 83% of the country. Is this right? Then there is the cost. It's going to cost like the dickens. At least $2,000,000,000,000.00. How about that? Read on...

Via the Cato Institute:
Michael D. Tanner, senior fellowmtanner@cato.org:

The CBO scoring makes it clear that the Baucus bill's reduction in future budget deficits comes not from controlling government spending or reducing health care costs, but because of a rapid escalation in tax revenues. The bill imposes a 40 percent excise tax on health-insurance plans that offer benefits in excess of $8,000 for an individual plan and $21,000 for a family plan. Insurers would almost certainly pass this tax on to consumers via higher premiums. As inflation pushes insurance premiums higher in coming years, more and more middle-class families would find themselves caught up in the tax.

In fact, overall, the tax increases in the bill are more than double the amount of deficit reduction. This isn't a health care efficiency bill or a cost containment bill. It is a tax and spend bill, pure and simple.

Michael F. Cannon, director of health policy studiesmcannon@cato.org:
The CBO score of the Baucus bill is like a mystery novel with the last 50 pages missing. It fails to reveal both the full cost of the bill and the budget gimmicks that Mr. Baucus uses to hide that cost.

The Baucus bill will not reduce the deficit, and it would ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion—just like every other bill Congress has produced so far.

The biggest gimmick employed by the bill is that its individual mandate pushes more than half of the legislation's cost off-budget, and onto businesses and individuals who will have to shoulder that burden. A real-world parallel already exists in the Massachusetts health care plan, where private-sector mandates account for 60 percent of the cost. In 1994, CBO counted those mandated private payments in the federal budget, and it helped kill the Clinton health plan. This time around, Democrats were very careful to craft their mandates so that they just barely avoided having the CBO include those payments in the federal budget. But the CBO's decision does not change the fact that those private-sector mandates are part of the cost of this bill.

The second-biggest gimmick is assuming that Congress will let the "Sustainable Growth Rate" cuts in Medicare physician payments to occur. Starting in 2003, Congress has repeatedly blocked those cuts, and there is no reason to think that Congress will behave any differently in the future. So yes, provided that the sun rises in the West, the Baucus bill would reduce the federal deficit.

No comments: