Congress wants America to believe its new promises to control spending even as it reneges on its old promises and spends more than ever. The “new” promise within health care reform bills is to reduce Medicare spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet simultaneously, Congress is reversing 1997 legislation …
Forget the President’s rhetoric about bending the health care cost curve. The House of Representatives will soon vote on legislation (H.R. 3961) that effectively repeals the cost control mechanism included in the Medicare physician payment update formula back in 1997. Passage of H.R. 3961 would add another $210 billion to …
The Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation, have produced videos explaining why Keynesian economics is wrong, presenting the evidence that big government hurts economic growth, explaining how big government hurts economic growth, and making the case against the Value Added Tax. Now Mitchell is …
Next week, the House of Representatives is scheduled to take up a bill (H.R. 3961) which would enact a permanent “fix” to the unquestionably flawed Medicare physician payment update formula. The Congress created a formula for physician Medicare payment that would automatically cut doctor payments, but has routinely acted to …
The Wall Street Journal draws our attention to a burst of honesty from The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy: The future cost savings that the Administration and its congressional allies are promising to deliver are based on wishful thinking and sleight of hand. Over time, the reform, as proposed, would almost …
It turns out that neither nuclear weapons nor terrorism may be the greatest threat to American prosperity and security. Instead, it may be something we hear very little about in the mainstream media: our burgeoning national debt. Runaway spending on entitlements, bailouts, and stimulus bills are driving the budget deficit …
The key to this chart is the second graph showing the spending “cuts” in the H.R. 3962. Nobody in world believes those cuts will happen. Which is why the true cost of the House health Bill is $1.5 trillion.
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 …
