On the campaign trail, then Senator Obama set a course for universal coverage of children through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and opposed an individual mandate. H.R. 3962, as introduced by the House leadership, repeals the SCHIP program in 2014 and includes an individual mandate. Moreover, the bill would send millions of young, healthy adults into Medicaid which will increase the cost of insurance for every one with private coverage because of the cost shift and “crowd out effect” associated with Medicaid.
Speaker Pelosi’s mammoth health legislation, H.R. 3962, includes the largest Medicaid expansion in history, adding as many as 18 million people to the program. Not only will childless adults become eligible for Medicaid for the first time in the history of the program, approximately 5 million children who have been served under the successful and popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) will also be transferred into Medicaid. Speaker Pelosi’s bill preempts the decisions previously made by the elected women and men in state capitols. For more than 10 years, …
In the desperate attempt to portray their massive new spending bill as “budget neutral,” Congress and the Obama Administration are relying on more desperate measures to hide the true cost of the legislation. The Senate Finance Committee bill includes Section 1209, aka the “Fail-Safe Mechanism to Prevent Increase in Federal Budget Deficit.” But it is more than just a budget gimmick, it is an unprecedented change in the balance of power from Congress to the President that ought to unite liberals and conservatives in opposition to it. This is either …
Members of Congress too often just forget: Medicaid is a welfare program. It is also one of the most poorly performing of all the federal welfare programs. Instead of doing anything innovative or imaginative to fix it, Members of Congress are intent on ramping up Medicaid spending and expanding it. Many currently uninsured Americans are going to be in for a rude surprise when they discover that they won’t be enrolling in superior private health plans, but rather Medicaid, courtesy of the U.S. Congress. The Chief Actuary at the Centers …
Very soon, the House of Representatives is expected to vote on legislation ( H.R. 3962). That 1990 page bill, if enacted, will have an unprecedented impact on our economy, the federal budget, and the lives of all Americans. You can read that bill right here. Here is a crucial question: Do members of Congress have any idea how this massive legislation will really affect us? Does anyone in the Speaker’s Office or in the Congressional leadership really know how moving the various parts of health care legislation will interact with …
Now that the Baucus Plan has been introduced as actual legislative language, it is clear more time is necessary to have a full understanding of the massive 1,500 page bill. As members get the opportunity to read the bill, more problems are likely to emerge on a daily basis. For example, the Baucus Plan either puts states into fiscal jeopardy or provides another budget gimmick to avoid paying the full cost of the legislation through the treatment of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The SCHIP provisions have significant …
The House and Senate are clearly divided over how to pay for the massive new spending commitments the federal government is taking on. Right now, House and Senate Democrats are meeting behind closed doors to figure out who they will tax and how much they can cut Medicare to meet what will be at least a $1 trillion commitment in new spending. Assuming for just the moment that they can make them match, Congress should look to the example of what Medicaid has done to state budgets. Medicaid Mess. The …
The Congressional Budget Office preliminary estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s work is a devastating revelation. The bill is a platform for an enormous jump in federal spending, and yet it still leaves 25 million Americans without health insurance. The gross cost of new federal outlays increased from $738 billion to $829 billion. Meanwhile, the Baucus bill will accelerate, contrary to the president’s rhetoric, the government’s “takeover” of the health care sector of the economy. Nearly half of the individuals who gain insurance will be through Medicaid, a poorly performing …
An important part of a magician’s trick is to keep the audience’s focus away from what he is actually doing. In the case of health care reform, the discussion of affordability has focused on how much the individual or family will still have to pay after our health insurance system has been “reformed.” Little attention has been paid to the how much those individuals will receive from their neighbors in order to entice them to join the rest of the insured. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has provided a table …
Just hours after the Senate Finance Committee completed its mark-up of its version of health care reform, Committee staff released a statement that announced, “[i]n a letter sent to Congressional leaders yesterday, Democratic governors affirmed their shared commitment to expanding health care coverage to millions of low-income Americans through the Medicaid program.” Worried Governors The press release, however, overstates the case. The governors’ letter does not even mention Medicaid. The very general sentiments expressed in the governors letter such as “… the status quo is no longer an option …” …
