House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership are frantically trying to find enough votes to pass their giant 2,032 page health care legislation this weekend. But before Speaker Pelosi and liberals in Congress pass their big bill, the American taxpayers should be fully aware of the full price tag of this monster. As Heritage analysts noted earlier in the week, the Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary score of the bill (H.R. 3962) but too many in the media have not been reporting its true cost. The true …
A Lewin Group study commissioned by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, finds that although the Baucus health care bill (the legislation that recently passed the Senate Finance Committee) is often touted as the most fiscally responsible of all of Congress’s reform plans, it “relies on certain cost containment approaches that have not worked in the past” and therefore “does not bend the total health care cost curve downward.” Rather than fundamentally realigning incentives in the health sector to lower the overall cost of care, the Baucus bill imposes top down …
Nancy Pelosi has unveiled the new health care bill in the House after merging together three different versions of legislation. To appease moderate Blue Dog Democrats and to meet President Obama’s oft-stated promise that reform wouldn’t cost more than $900 billion in the first ten years, Speaker Pelosi sought to reduce the $1.5 trillion total cost of the bill. Newsflash: she failed. The Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary score of the bill and the media have been reporting its cost as $894 billion. But this is the net cost …
Behind closed doors, the House and Senate leaders are trying to cobble together very different and complex provisions of their respective bills. A key issue is the impact of the public plan, a government run health plan intended to compete against private health plans. In the House version of the bill (H.R. 3200), payment to doctors and hospitals will be pegged to Medicare rates. Specifically, the bill calls for payment for medical services to be set at Medicare payment levels with a 5 percent increase for only certain physicians. In …
The Chief Actuary in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the Obama Health and Human Services department issued a memorandum late yesterday looking at the potential impact of the House health reform legislation (H.R. 3200). As the Associated Press and other media outlets have been reporting, the study shows that- among other things- the legislation would, as President Obama promised, bend the health care cost curve … but in the wrong direction.
While some prominent physician groups at the national level like the American Medical Association have suggested that the typical doctor on net would be better off if Congress’s health care legislation were to pass—mainly because of all the changes in Medicare payment methodology—those groups have generally failed to acknowledge a number of the critical issues. Based on the provisions of the House health care bill (H.R. 3200), here are the simple facts: • As millions of Americans are moved from private insurance to public coverage, with the introduction of a …
Despite continued controversy surrounding the idea, President Obama and certain Democratic leaders of Congress continue to support health care legislation that includes a new government-run health plan, commonly known as the “public option.” Liberal advocates who are pushing the so-called public option believe that a new government plan would keep private insurers “honest” and help control health care costs. Conservatives—including analysts at Heritage—have instead argued that a public plan (especially one that’s modeled on Medicare) would arbitrarily cut payments to health care providers and shift costs onto private payers, causing …
Today the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual estimate of the uninsured. While there is always valid discussion and debate over the number of uninsured (for recent analyses click here and here), an important component that gets overlooked is the emerging trend within existing sources of coverage. This year’s census numbers expose a troubling shift: government programs continue to gain ground while private insurance is on the decline. There are a variety of reasons for this change — including expansions of public programs, like Medicaid and SCHIP, and the early …
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary analysis of the proposed changes to Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit for seniors, under the Ways and Means version of H.R. 3200, the House Democrats’ health care bill. The bill would make a number of changes to the Medicare program and its drug benefit, including phasing out the infamous doughnut hole or gap in drug coverage that some seniors have run up against. In a recent letter, the CBO estimated: “That enacting the proposed changes would lead to an average …
Three weeks ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary score of the Kennedy-Dodd health reform bill. CBO estimated that Title I of the draft legislation alone would have added $1 trillion to the federal deficit while only extending coverage to 16 million of the uninsured. The score sent the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee back to the drawing board. Although Democrats on the HELP committee pledged to be bipartisan and transparent as they reworked the bill, those promises were broken late last week. While the …
