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Thursday, April 22, 2010

The Numbers Were A Lie All Along

The gloss is off the Obamacare rose, if it ever were there. The Office of the Actuary of Medicare has released a report which finds that Obamacare will increase, not decrease, health care costs, and ... (wait for it because you never would have guessed) ... the financial assumptions were unrealistic!

Shocked, shocked.

As reported by AP:

President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law will increase the nation's health care tab instead of bringing costs down, government economic forecasters concluded Thursday in a sobering assessment of the sweeping legislation.

A report by economic experts at the Health and Human Services Department said the health care remake will achieve Obama's aim of expanding health insurance — adding 34 million Americans to the coverage rolls.

But the analysis also found that the law falls short of the president's twin goal of controlling runaway costs, raising projected spending by about 1 percent over 10 years. That increase could get bigger, however, since the report also warned that Medicare cuts in the law may be unrealistic and unsustainable, forcing lawmakers to roll them back.

The CBO numbers were rigged, because the CBO was forced to follow unrealistic assumptions in its forecasts.

We said it, the American people understood it, but the Democrats forced the bill through anyway. They must pay the price in November.

Update: Now it makes sense. The Democrats refused to delay the vote on Obamacare even though the Medicare Actuary was not able to complete his analysis and cost estimates in time for the vote. In light of this report, it is clear why the Democrats didn't want to wait. They could game the CBO, but not the Medicaire Actuary.

Also, the full report is here.

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Related Posts:
CBO Credibility The First Victim Of Obamacare
Inconvenient Words In CBO Report

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10 comments:

  1. From your lips to God's ears. Let's hope November won't be too late .

    ReplyDelete
  2. We can do a lot better than this, but will we?

    I remember the 1994 K w/ America.

    It was a failure. I mean, it was a bit of a lapse of spending skyrocketing that ended thanks to Republicans.

    We haven't had a budget surplus in my entire life (there has been no year that the US Debt went down in decades).

    The GOP will have their House, maybe two houses of Congress. And they will slow the damage a bit, maybe even replace this Obamacare with something else (please be called Boehnercare!), and within a decade, the spending will be skyrocketing away as the entirlement tower falls on us.

    We're making a mess, and the only solution I have is the party of Steele, who wants to "offer things" to races, and Mccain and Graham and Romney.

    If the GOP doesn't seriously prove themselves finally capable of coherently and consistently standing the line for a steady budget surplus (enough to manage our amazing liabilities and debt), then I am going to become a third party voter.

    I donate and volunteer for the GOP, have for a while, and I always look with disdain at those hopeless Perot voters and libertarian voters and Tea Party Third Party wishers.

    The GOP is actually acting WORSE now than it was 2 years ago. Romney, Huck, Mccain, and Steele are the leaders of this party. Slowing down a sure path to disaster isn't good enough at this point... Obama has made things pretty urgent, and while I will be GOP this year, I am strongly interested in a third party that might catch on and displace the GOP the way it displaced the Whigs.

    Our nation is very similar to 1860s America, and this isn't quite as crazy as it was in 1992.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Take a look at Gov. Gary Johnson, google the Our america initiative, or click the Gary Johnson tag on DuelingBarstools.com

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Slow Joe:
    We need to get rid of "Romney, Huck, and Mccain." Steel is imo irrelevant. Also, the GOP has always been a bottom up sort of party, and we are now pwning at the local and state level. Cristie is completely kicking butt in NJ for example, and I hear the tea partiers have completely taken over the Utah state convention and will be dealing with the RINOS.

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  5. Wha...I...you mean...He would lie to us? But...but...the Party of the Little Guy....they would never.....Oh, my......

    @Slow Joe: Many of us in the Conservative movement are actively working over the Republicans. We are infiltrating their meetings, bringing their members to our side and actively moving to change their leadership. The only way we fix this is to remain engaged and build the GOP into the unapologetic Conservative machine that can reach voters in the way Reagan did. Here in Wisconsin, TEA Party groups have had incredible success stopping some extremely toxic bills when Democrats have overwhelming majorities (voter fraud enabling bill, [alleged] Global Warming bill and others). It happened because we were strong and smart. We must continue to force our will on our elected representatives. "Never give up, never surrender"!

    ReplyDelete
  6. The Bush administration threatened to fire the Medicare actuary if he revealed to Congress what Bush's drug benefit would cost.

    In November I'm not voting to support the Republican Party. I'm voting for divided government.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "They must pay the price in November."

    How? Are they going to personally going to tap into their ill-gotten caches of taxpayer money gathered from lobbyists and corporate sinecures to refund our $3.9 trillion?

    Oh, you meant by being voted out of office so their illicit earnings become even more opaque?

    Yeah, what a payback. I shudder at the thought of it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Politicians never have to pay a price for taking risks with economic plans. I think when politicians promote economic policies and plans that do not work as promised, they should suffer a personal loss (no raises, retirement benefits, banned from lobbying,lose of chairmanships, i.e. distancing from being able to be involved in government). Instead, they seem to gain power the longer they mess around.

    An easy example would be the failure of the stimulus to produce private employment as promised. The political elites made particular promises that were easy to verify. If we had a law that punished them for making wrong assumptions,or voting on them, they wouldn't make so many. I would allow a reasonable margin of error, which would make the projections less likely to game for immediate political benefit. If they are going to play economist, they need to take it serious. If those who promoted and voted for the stimulus lost as much in pay or retirement as the amount their predictions were off, they'd mess around a lot less in the economy. I bet a personal punishement would limit government better than any philosophical argument would.

    I live in Michigan, where the governor also has never run a business, yet insists she knows how to pick winners and losers. She's half right, she knows how to pick losers.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Wonder if Waxman's gonna call the head of the Office of the Actuary of Medicare before the congress to grill him about this announcement.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I wish I believed that things could change in DC. But at this point I think they are operating in a state totally disconnected from the rest of the country. And they care little about reality. The power fix is in and it's starting to look like they can do what they want because they've so destroyed the Constitution to render it powerless.

    My advice for everyone is to get out of debt asap and protect yourself.

    ReplyDelete