Friday, March 19, 2010

Oh look a new CBO estimate is out today. Dems healthcare will create a deficit

At the request of Congressman Paul Ryan, the CBO has a new (more honest) evaluation of the Dems health care bill. For months, the Democrats have avoided adding the "doc fix" into their bill. The reason the Dems continue to avoid adding the doc fix to the health care bill is because the costs are very high. If the Democrats do not pass the doc fix almost immediately, doctors performing Medicare services will get a 20% pay cut. That pay cut would cause doctors nationwide to dump Medicare patients. Obviously this cannot be allowed to happen. It would devastate the Medicare system sending many seniors into a panic.

The temporary doc fix bill expires in a couple of weeks. Even if the Dems manage to pass the legislation this weekend without the doc fix included, they will immediately have to deal with the doc fix or send Medicare into a tail spin.

That being said, adding the doc fix to the CBO where it should be and will probably end up in the next few weeks, changes everything. The health care bill actually loses money.

When even the San Francisco Chronicle, Speaker Pelosi's hometown newspaper, recognizes this budget gimmick, there is a problem.

Beyond these disputes, several budget gimmicks are used to hold down costs during the 10-year window: The bill starts revenue increases immediately but postpones major spending for four years; a $370 billion "doc fix" to increase Medicare payments to doctors was removed from the bill.


Today, the new CBO estimate, which includes the doc fix shows that in the first 10 years alone, the bill loses $59 billion.

You asked about the total budgetary impact of enacting the reconciliation
proposal (the amendment to H.R. 4872), the Senate-passed health bill
(H.R. 3590), and the Medicare Physicians Payment Reform Act of 2009
(H.R. 3961). CBO estimates that enacting all three pieces of legislation would add
$59 billion to budget deficits over the 2010–2019 period.
Under current law, Medicare’s payment rates for physicians’ services will be
reduced by about 21 percent in April 2010 and by an average of about 2 percent
per year for the rest of the decade.2


Of course, this is all information that the liberals will ignore on Sunday when they cast there vote.

Unfortunately, this means that every single liberal voting for this will have to spend the time between now and the election in November explaining to the American people why they purposefully mislead them.

If this passes, even President Obama will be running his next election on health care reform. He too will be stuck trying to explain why it is he defied the will of the people, slapped the American people in the face and chose to do what he wanted to anyway.

On Monday morning, if this passes on Sunday, the American people start taking their government to task and start figuring out ways to repeal this government control of our lives.

Right now, Washington is being inundated with over 100,000 phone calls an hour. That only gets worse on Monday.

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