If you’re like me you’ve heard on the Cable TV and in the newspapers that repealing the Obamacare Individual Mandate will save $300 Billion and asked yourself, how does that work exactly?
Should you find a semi-reputable source, like say The New York Times for instance, you’ll find a paragraph similar to this-
If it becomes law, the repeal would save more than $300 billion over a decade but result in 13 million fewer Americans being covered by health insurance by the end of that period, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Republicans said on Tuesday that they would use the savings — which stem from reduced government spending to subsidize health coverage — to pay for an expansion of the middle-class tax cuts that lawmakers had proposed.
Well, that is kind of ok I guess. You have the fact that it will “result in 13 million fewer Americans being covered by health insurance”, you have “which stem from reduced government spending to subsidize health coverage”, alright.
Then you also have the flat out lie (presented as neutral fact) that these are “middle-class tax cuts” (you know, Krugman publishes in your own damn paper moron and he has a Nobel Prize in Economics, try reading it sometime) which counts against but that’s not my main point.
My main point is this- what connects the two? How do you get $300 Billion in savings from simply removing the penalties for not having health insurance?
The answer is that without the mandate young, healthy, idiots invulnerables will leave the market.
That will make the pool (everybody else) sicker and older which will raise premiums (hey, insurance companies don’t do it for charity you know) and drive even more people to not have insurance because they can’t afford it. It is because less people will be insured therefore reducing the Government subsidy that money will be saved.
The solution to all of this is to raise taxes on everybody, eliminate Health Insurance Companies (filthy leeches the lot of them) and their premiums, and institute a Single Payer System that can reduce Health Care costs by negotiating directly with providers and reduce their profits to close to what the rest of the civilized world pays.
Not surprisingly-
In a letter on Tuesday, groups representing doctors, hospitals and insurers urged congressional leaders to keep the individual mandate in place. The groups, which included the American Medical Association and America’s Health Insurance Plans, wrote that “eliminating the individual mandate by itself likely will result in a significant increase in premiums, which would in turn substantially increase the number of uninsured Americans.”
We have to keep our phony baloney jobs!
To be protected from a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, the tax bill can add no more than $1.5 trillion to federal budget deficits over a decade, and it cannot add to the deficit after a decade. Eliminating the mandate starting in 2019 would reduce federal budget deficits by a total of $338 billion by 2027, the Congressional Budget Office said last week.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, a member of the Republican leadership who also serves on the Finance Committee, said the savings from repealing the mandate would be “distributed in the form of middle-income tax relief.”
Mr. Thune said he was confident that the tax plan, with the mandate repeal as part of it, could pass the Senate.
But not all senators were as sanguine about its passage and Republicans will need to carefully calibrate votes, given that they hold a narrow 52-seat majority in the Senate.
“I personally think that it complicates tax reform,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine.
There’s that lie about “middle-income tax relief” again but fortunately Sue Collins does not appear to be deceived. Even if it did deliver the expected $500, how long do you think that would take to be eaten up by your 10% premium increase? Months?
This is simply a vehicle to give $1.5 Trillion to Multi-National Mega Corporations and the wealthiest 1% Plutocrats (who control a full 50% of the world’s wealth by the way) while picking your pockets to service their illusionary deficit and debt fetish.
Recent Comments