From Lori Montgomery at the Washintgton Post: [1]
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.
[2]If you’re interested, here’s the report itself, in PDF format. [3]
Big Government, noting the same link, [4] says with some interest that as of the 23rd of Last Month… HHS still hadn’t published the analysis on their website, even though it was written by its own staff. We have a feeling it may never find a home there. So far they’re apparently right… it’s still not there.
The bottom line in this report is so intuitive, so obvious, that one wonders why the Democrats are trying to argue the point at all. Government health care is going to reduce quality of care, and depth of care while raising costs. Period. There is no way around it, in the first place, because saving money, and government, first of all, don’t mix. I would be quite happy to attain argument on this point, assuming that anyone could bring a credible argument to the table about it; government , whenever it becomes involved with any project always adds cost and inefficiency. In fact, I suggest that the case can be made that Healthcare costs of been rising specifically because government has been overly involved with it since Johnson’s Not So Great Society.
Secondly it’s particularly true if you go about this trying to “save” money. not only do you have the additional weight of government, adding that cost and inefficiency, but then you’re going to tell us that we have an overall savings to boot? Sorry, that doesn’t wash. The only way that’s going to happen is if Soylant Green really is Grandma. [5]
The fact of the matter is that just about every independent expert has been saying this since been day one. The government health care bills… any of them …. will increase costs. Higher taxes, less health care. Stacking that on to an already overburdened economy makes one wonder just what these morons are thinking. Anyone worried about the financial future of this country will get up on their hind legs and start hollering at the top of their lungs:
NO!
The total experience of the world to date has been that the answer is always less government, not more. More government is precisely what this bill is about, and what the Democrats are about. It’s about time that we throttled both.