President Obama has repeatedly claimed that he is “going to keep on fighting for what matters to middle class families.” Well, in this “fight,” the President seems to be his own worst enemy. His health care law does far more damage than good to the American middle class. Here are the five most prevalent and harmful burdens the middle class will be forced to bear under Obamacare: More taxes. Obamacare imposes $502 billion of new or increased taxes and fees. Heritage expert Curtis Dubay explains that several of the taxes …
Medicare at Risk: Visualizing the Need for Reform View more presentations from The Heritage Foundation Heritage’s new chart series, “Medicare at Risk: Visualizing the Need for Reform,” shows that, without the necessary structural reform, Medicare’s finances will have devastating consequences on the federal budget, not to mention taxpayers and seniors alike. Medicare’s Impact on the Budget. Medicare spending is rising faster than any other part of the federal budget, and it’s a major driver of runaway deficit spending in the not-so-distant future. Retiring baby boomers and rising health care costs …
Consumer-directed health plans have become increasing popular because of their ability to save consumers money. Breaking research published by Health Affairs shows that if consumer-directed health plans increased as a share of employer-sponsored plans from 12.4 percent to 50 percent, it could save $57.1 billion annually in national health expenditures. The report states, “Savings of this magnitude would account for 7 percent of all health care spending for the population with employer-sponsored insurance and 4 percent for the nonelderly population as a whole.” The study uses two types of consumer-directed …
Yet another provision of Obamacare is expected to cost taxpayers more than they expected. The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently sent a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) asking for details regarding the probable loss of $3.1 billion out of the $3.4 billion in Obamacare loans to its Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (“CO-OP”). The estimate comes from the President’s Budget Appendix, and the committee is considering rescinding funds that haven’t already been obligated. The Obamacare initiative gives CMS the authority to award $3.4 billion …
On Monday, the Obama Administration signaled that another part of its signature health care law may not be working out as planned. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) put an end to a program that offered a $100 incentive to insurance brokers and agents for recommending eligible people to Obamacare’s Pre-Existing Conditions Insurance Plan (PCIP). Obamacare created the PCIP, commonly called a high-risk pool, as a temporary way to cover those with pre-existing or chronic conditions before 2014, when insurance companies will be prohibited from excluding people based …
The House Ways and Means Committee just released a report that shows that the most successful companies would save billions of dollars if they stopped offering coverage to their employees and dumped them into the taxpayer-funded Obamacare exchanges. On a confidential basis, 71 Fortune 100 companies supplied information to the committee regarding the cost and coverage of their health insurance plans. The committee used the data to calculate the potential savings of dumping employees into the exchanges and paying the employer mandate penalty. The report’s findings will likely scare the …
The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health held a hearing last Friday to discuss the bipartisan effort behind competing premium support plans. These plans would restructure traditional Medicare and guarantee its fiscal stability in the future. As Chairman Wally Herger (R–CA) said: Unless Congress acts, the Medicare program that seniors and people with disabilities rely on will go bankrupt in just a few short years.… The premium support model holds promise to place Medicare on sound financial footing while transforming and modernizing the program to provide greater choice for …
In a recent article for MarketWatch, Andrea Coombes writes, “Whatever their opinion of the health-care reform law, wealthy Americans have a lot of money at risk in the Supreme Court’s coming decision on the law’s constitutionality.” Yes, the rich will pay higher taxes under Obamacare. But they aren’t the only ones. Obamacare raises taxes by more than $500 billion in a decade, and a number of these will hit Americans at all levels of the income scale. The specific tax hikes Coombes describes are initially intended to impact just the …
A new study by the Urban Institute reconfirms a vital fact: Medicare’s massive increase in enrollment, largely attributable to retiring baby boomers, is driving its fiscal instability. This is an important finding, because during the health care debate of 2009, advocates of Obamacare insisted that excess health care cost inflation was the more urgent problem contributing to Medicare’s fiscal nightmare. A recent report by Charles Blahous, a public trustee for Medicare, explains: This viewpoint increased in prominence when Peter Orszag, one of [Obamacare’s] leading advocates, was named to head the …
One of the biggest fears Americans have about Obamacare is who will ultimately control health care decisions: the government or patients and their doctors. New research by Heritage health policy analyst Kathryn Nix explains that while the law does not explicitly put those decisions in the hands of the government, it does allow government bureaucrats to unduly influence medical care. Enter comparative effectiveness research (CER), which compares different methods for preventing, diagnosing, or treating a specific disease or condition. In her paper, Nix explores the many ways CER might be …
