Americans will feel the pain before the gain from the health care overhaul Democrats are close to pushing through Congress.
Proposed taxes and fees on upper-income earners, insurers, even tanning parlors, take effect quickly. So would Medicare cuts.
Benefits, such as subsidies for lower middle-income households, consumer protections for all and eliminating the prescription coverage gap for seniors, come gradually.
“There’s going to be an expectations gap, no question about that,” said Drew Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. “People are going to see their premiums and out-of-pocket costs go up before the tangible benefits kick in.”
“People are going to see their premiums and out-of-pocket costs go up before the tangible benefits kick in.”
and Democrats are going to see themselves kicked out as well….
I suspect that (should this package pass) there will be a bitter pill and NO relief. The pain might shift, a little bit, but it will not go away.
Who know what the final bill will look like? As proposed by the House, apparently middle and lower-income people who are married will pay much more in premiums than they would if they were cohabitating. There are going to be a lot of angry people.
When Washington D.C. acts, the remainder of the country pays the bill.
But once it’s in place, it will be very hard to undo – and that’s what the Democrats are counting on. They have said that they don’t mind losing few seats in the next election, because once this bill is passed, they know single-payer (government-run) healthcare is just a matter of time. So it won’t matter – if this bill passes and the GOP wins more seats in 2010, the bill is still law and the GOP can do very little about it.
From here:
The AP report is a bit… optimistic about the overall effect.
[blockquote]”The chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, has estimated that if the Senate health care bill became law, it would make the United States health care system more expensive than if we simply did nothing — undermining the primary rationale for Obama’s health care push.”[/blockquote]
From [url=http://spectator.org/blog/2009/12/11/hhs-actuary-finds-senate-bill]here.[/url]
🙄
Another good example of “don’t fix what ain’t broke.”
This is old news however. Our local business newspaper did a story a couple of months ago, where it predicted the cost of an average policy here would immediately go to $15,000 because of the effects of Obamacare. It’s already expensive, I personally pay about $14K a year for family coverage, but this will just make everything worse with less benefits.
The reason for the early kick-in of the higher taxes and benefit cuts and later kick-in of the actual program is–pure and simple–a sleight-of-hand trick to make the bill appear revenue-neutral, or even (laughingly) to bring the deficit down. No one from the Congressional Budget Office has published the true annual costs of this bill.
[blockquote]…if this bill passes and the GOP wins more seats in 2010, the bill is still law and the GOP can do very little about it. [/blockquote]
I can say with great confidence that the GOP [b] [i] will [/b][/i] do very little about it.