Now Which Lie Will The Tea Party Use to Raise Money?

Let's see how that GOP is approaching this law and their constituents.

Calif. GOP ‘reaches for the bottom’

12/04/13 08:00 AM
By Steve Benen

Health care policy can get confusing, even for policy experts who study the details for a living. It’s one of the reasons dishonesty in the political debate surrounding health care is so damaging – even the most well-intentioned people often don’t know how best to separate fact from fiction.

It’s why efforts from political officials – who know better – to deliberately confuse people are so disappointing. Michael Hiltzik reports:

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Opponents of the Affordable Care Act never stop producing new tricks to undermine the reform’s effectiveness. But leave it to California Republicans to reach for the bottom. Their goal appears to be to discredit the act by highlighting its costs and penalties rather than its potential benefits.​

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The device chosen by the Assembly’s GOP caucus is a website at the address coveringcaliforniahealthcareca.com. If that sounds suspiciously like coveredca.com, which is the real website for the California insurance exchange, it may not be a coincidence.​

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In theory, this is a site created by California Republicans to serve as a “resource” for those looking for additional information. In practice, the site “is worse than useless” – it didn’t direct users to the in-state exchange marketplace, and includes demonstrable falsehoods intended to deceive the public.

Like what? The site includes the ridiculous notion that the Affordable Care Act increases the federal budget deficit, which is the exact opposite of reality. It also claims the IRS will use the law to target conservatives; it says the law will discourage private-sector hiring; and it even hints in the direction of the death-panel smear by raising the specter of “rationing” for the elderly.

All of these claims are wrong. All of them are presented, however, on a website that presents itself as objective and non-partisan.

Stepping back, dishonesty on this scale is certainly brazen, but it raises anew a lingering question: if the Affordable Care Act is so awful, and will be as horrific as critics claim, why do Republicans continue to feel the need to make stuff up? Shouldn’t reality be damaging enough?

Again, all things that were said about both Medicare and Social Security.

 

Ask the CBO! Their estimates are now up to $3,000,000,000,000. (In case you cannot read that, Mr. RB, That is TRILLION.)

 

Thanks for you opinion. Any proof to actually share?

 

Now here are the facts from the CBO:

In May, 2013 the Congressional Budget Office wrote House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis, stating, that it and the Joint Committee on Taxation “most recently estimated the budgetary impact of repealing the [Affordable Care Act] in July 2012. In a letter to Speaker Boehner (sent on July 24, 2012), CBO described the direct spending and revenue effects of H.R. 6079, the Repeal of Obamacare Act, as passed by the House of Representatives earlier in July. In that letter, CBO indicated that the net savings from eliminating the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA would be more than offset by the combination of other spending increases and revenue reductions that repeal of the ACA would entail. On balance, CBO and JCT estimated, repealing the ACA would affect direct spending and revenues in ways resulting in a net increase in budget deficits of $109 billion over the 2013-2022 period.”
The ACA law as written requires a lot of money to be shelled out over the next 10 years - $1.4 trillion. But it also raises tax revenue and the hope is that it will help cut health care costs.
As a result, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the law as a whole would reduce deficits.

 

I can cut and paste too!

Niall Ferguson poked a hornet’s nest Sunday with his Newsweek cover story, in large part for its claim that Obamacare would increase the budget deficit.
“Anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] report knows that it found that [Obamacare] would reduce, not increase, the deficit,” wrote liberal economist Paul Krugman (referencing an outdated CBO analysis), “because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.”
As usual, however, Krugman missed the more fundamental point underlying Ferguson’s argument: It’s Obamacare’s spending that matters.
In government budgeting, spending comes first; it drives all other fiscal consequences. Spending is how government programs and agencies do what they do. “In a fundamental sense, the federal government is what it spends,” says longtime budget expert Allen Schick.
So it is with Obamacare. Its core is a pair of huge new entitlements: health insurance subsidies and expansion of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. They will add $1.683 trillion in new spending from now through 2022, according to CBO’s latest estimate (which helpfully isolates these components in a stand-alone table).
Even after including $515 billion in associated tax hikes, the net cost increase totals nearly $1.2 trillion. The new spending is the one certainty of the President’s health care takeover; without it, Obamacare doesn’t exist.
To hide this cost, at least on paper, Obamacare’s authors tacked on a series of extraneous offsets that give the appearance of deficit reduction under the conventions of CBO’s estimates. These “savings,” however, turn out to be unreal or unrealistic.
For example, the package assumes more than $700 billion in Medicare cuts, most of which are unachievable. Why? Because they rely on implausible productivity gains by Medicare providers—hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health agencies. As a result, reimbursements to these providers would fall increasingly below their costs—as much as 15 percent by 2019 and 40 percent by 2050—according to the 2012 Medicare trustees report. Providers could not sustain these negative margins, the trustees say, and “would have to withdraw from serving Medicare beneficiaries.”
Yet even if these savings were real—indeed, especially if they were real—Congress would probably end up rescinding them. Exhibit A: the “doc fix.”
The doc fix refers to a formula change Congress enacted in 1997 for annually updating Medicare physicians’ payments to slow the program’s cost growth. But when the new arrangement actually started reducing the doctors’ payments, Congress backed off. Since 2003, lawmakers have adopted a series of temporary delays, shielding physicians from payment cuts and wiping out growing amounts of assumed Medicare savings—more than $300 billion worth over the next 10 years, CBO estimates. Any other assumed savings in Medicare’s government-based price-fixing system will undoubtedly be subject to a similar fate.
Unless Obamacare is repealed, it will add $1.7 trillion in new spending. That much is certain. Any offsetting reductions are dubious, at best. Budgetary analysis and historical experience point to the same conclusion: If fully implemented, Obamacare will drive up health costs for all Americans and widen the river of government spending and debt.
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/08/22/obamacare-loses-again-in-deficit-reduction-debate/

 

You posted the Heritage Foundation's blog of what the CBO's report said. I posted what the CBO actually said. You see the difference? Of course you don't.

 

By it's nature Health Insurance makes healthcare more expensive. Not only do your premiums have to cover the costs and profits of the Healthcare Industry - it also has to cover the costs and profits of the Insurance Industry.

 

And don't forget it covers the cost of the additional IRS people, probably most of Sebelius' entourage, and numerous other governmental groups created and yet to be crated by Obamacare.

 

Single payer dude, single payer. Why should the health of people be a profit stream for anyone?

 

According to the U.S. census, the annual revenue for the health care industry was almost 1.7 trillion dollars. The health insurers themselves enjoy record profits year in and year out while cutting patient benefits, raising patient costs, and raising premiums.
Does focusing on imaginary entourages and fictitious unnamed "governmental groups" math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better while ignoring the real money drain on the system? Sure it does.

View attachment 2139

 

Based on what you wrote above - Insurance is the drain on the system. Yet the ACA forces everyone to buy insurance. Go figure.

 

Yes you are correct but the ACA also forces insurers to spend 80% of their revenue on actual health care rather than just their bottom lines. It also forces them to stop skimming the "cream" of the policy holders and prevents them from dumping sick people, putting lifetime limits on benefits, and does not allow them to refuse to insure people for preexisting conditions. They'll still make a profit but they won't make excessive profits draining necessary capital from the health care system. It's just a little more complicated than just making people participate in the current system. If you would realize that we tax payers have been footing the bill for the uninsured for a long time, working within the current system is going to be the best solution short of single payer. Or we could just have Medicare for all.

 

And I thought you told me Obamacare fixed all of that?

 

I am sure the Insurance Company actuaries have taken all that into account.

 

You do realize that the law has yet to be fully implemented? The figures I cited were obviously not from this year.

 

No...we had "defund", also.

Just watch! ...between now and next November, Liberals will come out with all sorts of give-away programs to buy back the votes they've lost.

Mark my words, Liberals will find some way to provide free marijuana as a "mental-health" drug to lure young people into Obamacare...(yeah, laugh now!)

 

Implemented? It has not been fully written yet.

 

Wait! ...didn't Obama go to Harvard? Oh...USAToday must be a Republican rag. Yeah...that must be it!

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/12/04/obama-harvard-poll-millenials/3868629/

Harvard poll: 57% of Millennials disapprove of Obamacare