The totals below, I am told by the Heritage Foundation, do NOT include the $250 billion extra spending on Medicare to buy off the American Medical Association for their support of the U.S. House bill.

The Democratic House Leadership has completely lost touch with fiscal reality.

The following is a cut and paste of a media statement by the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Gregg (R-NH):

Senator Gregg: Updated CBO Estimate of House Bill Pulls Back the Curtain on Majority’s Intent to Grow Government by $3 Trillion

Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee today commented on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) more detailed cost estimate of the manager’s amendment to the House health reform bill.

Senator Gregg stated, “The CBO estimate released last night finally sheds light on the smoke and mirrors game the majority has been playing with the cost of their health care reform proposal. Over the first 10 years, this legislation builds in gross new spending of $1.7 trillion – and most of the new spending doesn’t even start until 2014. Once that spending is fully phased in, the House Democratic bill rings up at more than $3 trillion over ten years.

“Additionally, this bill cuts critical Medicare and Medicaid funding by $628 billion, accounts for nearly $1.2 trillion in tax and fee increases and will explode the scope of government by putting the nation’s health care system in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. The $3 trillion price tag defies common sense – we simply cannot add all this new spending to the government rolls and claim to control the deficit.

“If we continue to pile more and more debt on the next generation, they will never be able to get out from under it. The health care system needs reform, but this massive expansion of government, financed by our children and grandchildren, is the wrong way to proceed.”

Here’s the main takeaways from the CBO analysis:

• The total cost to the taxpayer would be 61 billion (as Hot Air notes, this is opposed to the 1.2 trillion of taxpayer money that the Democrats want to spend).
• The plan will essentially keep the total percentage of insured individuals at around the current percentage of 83% (The Democrat’s main selling point on their version is that it will insure 96% of the population - including illegal immigrants).
• Premium rates would decrease across the board.
• The plan assumes tort reform, no government-option health care, and the ability to buy insurance across state lines.

In other words, there is no way whatsoever that the Democratic party in Congress is going to support this plan: it clashes horribly with the current ruling party’s shrill insistence that we are in a dire crisis with regard to health care, which just happens to require a solution that will eventually result in no private insurance and a state-run health care system.  It also directly affects the economic well-being of trial lawyers, which will hurt that group’s ability to make political contributions, which will hurt the Democratic party.  So, expect to see much made of the fact that the GOP plan will not expand coverage, and a good deal of pounding the table and shouting about deficit reductions.  Expect to not see much made of the fact that this plan will mostly leave people - and their bank accounts - alone about their health care decisions…

Moe Lane

PS: Twelve hour online GOP health care forum starts at 1 PM.

PPS: You should be up to page 1,062 on the Democrats’ health care rationing bill by now.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

From the NY Post’s “Prescriptions for Disaster” — when CBO scores the first ten years of spending, then we see the true cost of the House and Senate ObamaCare bills:

“Each bill is routinely “scored” for its 10-year costs from 2010-19. Yet this includes several years when the spending wouldn’t yet have kicked in. According to the Congressional Budget Office, fully 99.9 percent of the Pelosi bill’s costs would hit from 2013 onward. Similarly, 98.3 percent of Reid’s spending would come after 2014.

“The CBO reports that, in their true first 10 years, the House bill would cost $1.8 trillion, and the Senate bill would cost $1.7 trillion. Pelosi would raise Americans’ taxes by $1.1 trillion over that period, while Reid would hike them by $1 trillion.

And the House bill would siphon about $800 billion from Medicare to spend it elsewhere, while the Senate bill would suck out about $900 billion.”

The impact on our national debt:

“And if we discount the bills’ claims to divert hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare (which is already on the edge of insolvency), the CBO says the House bill would raise our national debt by about $650 billion in its real first decade, while the Senate bill would up it by $740 billion.

So, the bills would either sock older Americans by taking huge sums of money from Medicare — or hit future generations with huge tax hikes to cover the shortfall.”

That ‘mere’ 900 billion?  Not happening.

WASHINGTON – The health care bill headed for a vote in the House this week costs $1.2 trillion or more over a decade, according to numerous Democratic officials and figures contained in an analysis by congressional budget experts, far higher than the $900 billion cited by President Barack Obama as a price tag for his reform plan.

Via Hot Air Headlines. What did happen was that the Democrats decided to increase various programs by a third because… well, because the bill was there, and they have a commanding majority in both houses of Congress, and Democrats like spending your money on both worthy and ‘worthy’ causes*.  So, since they have no intention of paying for this thing anyway…

Hey, don’t look at me.  I didn’t vote for any of these people.  But how is that ‘teach the GOP a lesson’ thing working out for the rest of America?

Moe Lane

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MEMORANDUM EXCLUSIVE FOR REDSTATERS
FROM: Michael Hammond
RE: The Pelosi Bill

-The real cost of the bill is at least $1.3 trillion (the CBO score, plus the “doc fix”) –- and probably much, much more.

-The absolute minimum increase in the deficit would be $150 billion. You can probably add to this most of the $426 billion in supposed Medicare “cuts,” plus the substantial overruns in program costs as a result of underestimation of premiums. A deficit increase of between half a trillion dollars and a trillion dollars is almost certain.

-Employers would be required to purchase government-mandated government-prescribed insurance for all of their employees with premiums which, according to some estimates, would be double the minimum wage. With a penalty which, for most employees, would be 8% of payroll, it would be more economical to drop insurance for anyone making under $2-300,000, depending on the level of employer contribution.

-As a result, most individuals with employer-provided insurance will not be able to “keep the insurance they currently have.” The 10.2 million seniors with Medicare Advantage will also lose “the coverage they currently have.” And it is possible that the “grandfather” protection of individuals could be defeated by something as simple as a rate increase.

-Premiums will go through the roof and, unlike currently, Americans will be required to pay them, under penalty of law. Price Waterhouse estimates that the average family policy for a family of four will be $25,900 by 2019 (under the comparable Reid bill). And, although the study does not look at the impact of the subsidies, unlike the liberally touted Kaiser study, it does not ignore the impact of taxes on premiums.

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Total cost: $1.055 trillion

New Taxes: $572 billion

Cuts to Medicare: $426 billion

Not included: $247 billion needed to stop Medicare payments to doctors from decreasing, pledged to be passed in a separate bill to keep this bill “revenue neutral”

Pages: 1,990

The word regulation appears in the bill 181 times.

The word fees appears in the bill 103 times.

The word tax appears in the bill 214 times.

“As we all know, nothing says ‘affordability’ like higher taxes and fees.”

The word “shall” - as in “must” or “required to” - appears over 3,000 times. “The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase “mind our own freaking business.” Not once.”

From Dow Jones Newswires:

“The $1.055 trillion estimate also does not include $245 billion needed to stop Medicare payments to doctors from decreasing, which the House plans to address through separate legislation introduced Thursday.

The costs of the bill are fully offset by cuts to existing spending programs– including the Medicare?Advantage and other programs–saving $426 billion through 2019, and by tax increases raising $572 billion over that time, CBO said. In fact, the combined impact of provisions in the bill would be a net deficit reduction of $104 billion in the next decade, according to CBO.”

The abortion issue, you may recall, was described by George Stephanopoulos as “the gravest threat” to the health reform bill. The largest concentration of Democratic NO votes on health care reform are because of the abortion issue.

So, naturally, in an article about Speak Pelosi’s efforts to rally votes for ObamaCare, the New York Times actually talked about other issues besides the public option as critical to passage of the bill. Here is what the New York Times said about abortion yesterday:

“House Democratic leaders are still trying to figure out exactly how to limit the use of federal money for abortions.”

In other words, they know that their current language will not satisfy, among others, the Catholic Church, which issued a change it or else threat. But the Democratic Leadership has not figured out what to do. The demands of the pro-life Democrats have been really straight-forward, give us a vote on our amendments to ban federally funded abortions and allow medical providers the ability to refuse to perform or help perform abortions.

What this really means is that the Speaker does not want to compromise and allow pro-life amendments, unless she has absolutely no other choice in the matter.

On that issue, the NYT reports “Ms. Pelosi said she had not decided whether lawmakers would be allowed to offer amendments on the House floor.”

The Speaker will not allow the pro-life Democrats to offer and get votes on their amendments. She has not said yes, meaning she is now at no.

Further, the need to get CBO to score the bill before it gets to the House floor was also acknowledged as another complication, as the NYT reported: “In addition, before taking their bill to the House floor, Democrats need to get a cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.” This is no small matter, since scoring takes about two week, once CBO has the language in hand.

There are other issues that are causing intra-Dem heartburn, and one of them is the Democratic Governors who are very concerned about the unfunded mandates the federal government is imposing on State governments. A Medicaid concerns letter signed by more than a dozen (14) Democratic Senators, sent late last week to Senators Reid, Baucus and Dodd, can be found here.

It is useful to note that the Speaker does not have the votes for ObamaCare now, nor will she likely anytime soon. Other vote draining issues on the Democratic side are the cuts to Medicare Advantage, the public option, the spending and tax levels of the bill and whether to give illegal immigrants benefits under the bill.

The Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas W. Elmendorf, told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the House-passed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade tax climate change legislation – would slow the economy and would cause “significant” job losses in fossil fuel industries:

We want to leave no misunderstanding that aggregate performance — the fact that jobs turn up somewhere else for some people — does not mean that there are not substantial costs borne by people, communities, firms in affected industries and affected areas. You saw that in manufacturing, and we would see that in response to changes that this legislation would produce.

Director Elmendorf also testified that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax would cut the nation’s gross domestic product by 0.25 to 0.75 percent in 2020 compared with “what it would otherwise have been,” and by 1 to 3.5 percent in 2050.

Elmendorf’s testimony undercuts the current position of President Obama and the Democrats’ congressional leaders, who claim cap-and-tax would help revive the economy. They make that claim despite the fact that presidential candidate Obama said his cap and trade plan will cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket” and will bankrupt anyone who builds a coal-powered plant.

Politico (again) breaks a major story this morning with its outing of the Dem secret plan that Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation has been warning of for more than ten days:

a former House and Senate leadership aide sent an email sketching out another route to passage. Instead of introducing a Senate bill, Majority Leader Reid could insert the merged health care reform language into a revenue raising House bill already languishing in conference committee. The Senate would pass it and send it to the House whereupon passage, it would go straight to the president’s desk – completely bypassing conference. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

By cutting out conference, this single-bullet scenario eliminates weeks of expected wrangling and would make it possible to pass a bill by the Thanksgiving target so many Democrats are aiming for. Many insiders agree that a conference committee would make that goal next to impossible.

The Democrats are raping the Congressional process to pass ObamaCare:

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The unsatisfied quenching of the Dem thirst for health care reform continued as the Senate Finance Committee received their vapor score for their vapor bill which had the net effect of discrediting the Congressional Budget Office. U.S. Rep. Shadegg renamed CBO the Cooked Books Office with a stinging post (as in, that’s gotta hurt):

Could you make your family budget look good in a ten-year analysis if you counted ten years of income but only seven of expenditures? That’s what the Congressional Budget Office did in their report on Senator Max Baucus’s health care bill.

Their subpar accounting includes revenue from tax increases and cuts to Medicare and Medicare Advantage starting in 2010. However, the bulk of expenditures begin in 2013, when many of the bill’s programs go into effect. It sounds like the CBO has started taking accounting tips from old Enron manuals. How can Democrats be taken seriously if they use ten years of revenue to pay for seven years of expenditures?

Heritage Foundation’s Brian Darling weighed in yesterday with his “Where’s the Health Bill?” post in Human Events:

As you read this, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and officials of the Obama administration are in a room at the Capitol rewriting health care policy. The American people aren’t invited. Only a few lobbyists, Obama czars and liberal Senators have even been allowed to see this bill.

The Senate is keeping this bill a secret because politicians were shaken by the August town hall meetings and the rage expressed by the American people toward the president’s version of health care reform. So, to minimize complaints now, the administration and Sen. Reid are making sure citizens are shut out of the process.

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Could you make your family budget look good in a ten-year analysis if you counted ten years of income but only seven of expenditures? That’s what the Congressional Budget Office did in their report on Senator Max Baucus’s health care bill.

Their subpar accounting includes revenue from tax increases and cuts to Medicare and Medicare Advantage starting in 2010. However, the bulk of expenditures begin in 2013, when many of the bill’s programs go into effect. It sounds like the CBO has started taking accounting tips from old Enron manuals. How can Democrats be taken seriously if they use ten years of revenue to pay for seven years of expenditures?

It’s frightening that Congress could soon vote on a bill that will cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars without the crucial information of an honest CBO score. But that’s just what Democrats will ask us all to do. It is smoke-and-mirrors trickery that should have no place in Congress – a deceitful playbook from which the Congressional Majority has played from time and time again.

Democrats will use these CBO numbers to continue the charade that their proposals would reduce health care costs for Americans. But one only has to look at the dozens of new taxes Senator Baucus’s bill creates to see that health care will become much more expensive for Americans. And for the first three years, we really won’t be getting what we’re paying for.

The MSM would like the American public to believe that the Senate Finance Committee bill was scored by the Congressional Budget Office. After all, WaPo, the NYT and the WSJ reported:

WaPo: “The bill would cost $829 billion over the next decade.”

NYT: “The budget office analyzed the bill … its newly projected cost — $829 billion over 10 years.”

WSJ: “The latest Senate health bill will cost $829 billion over a decade.”

But it is a score of a vapor bill — a bill that has no legislative language — and so with much fanfare and pomp the CBO has delivered a Vapor Score of a Vapor Bill. CBO has stated publicly and repeatedly that it cannot accurately score any bill without the legislative language — which does not exist so CBO cannot have it.

Heritage tagged this correctly its Bait and Switch blog:

As the Politico reported yesterday: “While the media and lawmakers often shorthand a CBO letter as a “score” or “cost estimate,” today’s CBO letter is neither. Because the bill is still in “conceptual,” or layman’s terms, CBO’s letter today was a “preliminary analysis.” For it to be an official cost estimate, the bill has to be translated into legislative language.”

And here is a thought from Ryan Ellis at ATR, the reason the latest ObamaCare bill scores so low is because of all the taxes. Here is the list.

For a more wonky analysis of the Vapor Score, see the blog by Donald Marron, a former CBO economist here, and from which the quotes from the MSM above were taken.

Daily Kos is reporting that Organizing for America is sending emails to Democrats in Washington State to pressure Senator Cantwell to change her pledge to vote no on health care reform unless the Senate includes a public option. Senators Cantwell and Rockefeller have both pledged to vote No if the bill does not include a public option.

The Organizing for American email reads in part:

We need to pass a reform bill out of the Finance Committee and that comes down to just a few critical senators — including yours, Senator Maria Cantwell….

The question is will Rockefeller and Cantwell stick by their pledge? Since they are both on the Senate Finance Committee will it mean the bill cannot get out of Committee? Will Cantwell and Rockefeller hold the bill up in Committee until they get what they want, or does their pledge apply after the bill leaves Committee? It sounds like Organizing for America believes the pledge applies to the Committee vote.

If both Rockefeller and Cantwell vote no in Committee, then the Democrats must get Snowe’s vote to move the bill out of Committee.

Snowe’s support seems to hinge on the public option trigger, and a CBO score of the Committee bill before they vote — and for CBO to score the bill they need to see the legislative language, not a “conceptual bill,” written in essay form. CBO says it will take two weeks to produce the score, from the legislative language.

Here is an interesting exchange between Senators Snowe and Baucus yesterday, from the National Journal:

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The words tax/taxes and fine/fines appear in the Senator Baucus bill 243 times.

There are Not Enough Votes for the Baucus Bill to be Voted Out of the Finance Committee

Without Senators Wyden, Rockefeller and Snowe, Chairman Baucus does not have the votes to pass the bill out of the Senate Finance Committee.

This means there will be horse trading a-go-go and the results will be interesting.

Senators Wyden and Rockefeller are most upset about no public option being in the plan.

CBO Scores Senate Finance Committee Bill at $500 Billion — No increase in the Deficit

The Congressional Budget Office has scored the Senate Finance Committee bill at a cost of $500 Billion with a net deficit reduction of $49 billion because of the taxes and cuts to Medicare.

Sen. Rockefeller (D-WV) and Finance Committee Member says Senate Bill has a “Big, Big Tax”

Senator Rockefeller warning of a “big, big tax” on the middle class to pay for ObamaCare is very, very strange.

It would be like a staunch Republican warning that a planned tax cut is too big.

The only conclusion that can be reached is that health care reform has so stressed and strained Members of Congress and their constituents that these stresses are manifesting themselves in very, uh, unique ways.

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There is a new pro-Obamacare ad out by a group called “Americans for Stable Quality Care.” You can see the ad here.

The ad asks “what does health insurance reform mean for you?” One of the points is “a focus on preventing illness before it strikes.”

There’s a problem with that.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, preventative care will drive up the costs of Obamacare.

Doug Elmendorf, the CBO Director, responding to Congressman Nathan Deal, wrote that

Although different types of preventive care have different effects on spending, the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.

Elmendorf went on to write

Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness. An article published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine provides a good summary of the available evidence on how preventive care affects costs.3 After reviewing hundreds of previous studies of preventive care, the authors report that slightly fewer than 20 percent of the services that were examined save money, while the rest add to costs.

Now, lest anyone think either Elmendorf or I am knocking preventative care, we are not. Elmendorf notes that, “just because a preventive service adds to total spending does not mean that it is a bad investment. Experts have concluded that a large fraction of preventive care adds to spending but should be deemed ‘cost-effective.’ He’s right.

There’s just one problem that Elmendorf alludes to. The CBO cannot really score the run up in costs of preventative care under H.R. 3200, the Democrats’ healthcare legislation.

Assuming Obamacare is successful at increasing preventative care, the program will escalate costs. Then, also as Elmendorf alludes to, the government is going to have to decide who gets preventative care and who does not, if they want to contain costs.

In other words, we will get escalated unknown costs or we will get rationing, but most likely we will get both.

That’s what White House Budget Director Peter Orszag had to say about the Congressional Budget Office’s latest statement that “the probability is high that no [health care] savings would be realized” by creating yet another federal board to oversee the federal government’s $33 trillion Medicare mess.

Here’s what Orszag said:

With regard to the long-term impact, CBO suggested that the proposal, with several specific tweaks that would strengthen its operations, could generate significant savings. (The potential modifications included items such as providing mandatory funding for the council, rather than having the council rely on the annual appropriations cycle, and requiring independent verification of the expected reductions in program spending rather than relying only on the Medicare actuaries for such verification, along with other suggestions, such as including an across-the-board reduction in payments as a fallback mechanism if the council did not produce proposals that generated adequate savings.)

That’s right: Orszag, President Barack Obama’s hand-picked budgetary whiz, is highlighting an admission by CBO that cutting payments to doctors accepting Medicare patients would result in lower government spending on health care.

Of course, the fact that the few remaining physicians who accept Medicare patients would drop these already-unprofitable clients as a result (something already happening in cities and states around the country as a result of the low reimbursement rates and regular governmental failure to pay on time) doesn’t matter here. After all, it’s just the numbers that matter.

You know — numbers. Like the ones the bureaucrats running the public option’s cost-effectiveness spreadsheets will be entirely relying on to determine whether or not you’ll be allowed to get that tonsillectomy, chemotherapy, or heart operation this year (or ever).**

Ah, sweet numbers. Because on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, we all look the same.

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As Erick points out, Obamacare took another heavy shot today, as the CBO concluded that the much-vaunted reforms pushed by Democratrs to control Medicare costs would have little or no effect. OMB Director Orszag has fired back quickly however, in an attempt to turn lemons into lemonade. He says that while CBO may have little faith in the provisions as they are currently drafted, a few little tweaks can make a world of difference:

With regard to the long-term impact, CBO suggested that the proposal, with several specific tweaks that would strengthen its operations, could generate significant savings.  (The potential modifications included items such as providing mandatory funding for the council, rather than having the council rely on the annual appropriations cycle, and requiring independent verification of the expected reductions in program spending rather than relying only on the Medicare actuaries for such verification, along with other suggestions, such as including an across-the-board reduction in payments as a fallback mechanism if the council did not produce proposals that generated adequate savings.)

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The Politico is breaking some more bad news for Barry O and his socialist storm troopers. According to a CBO analysis, the $1 trillion healthcare plan’s independent panel designed to keep Medicare spending in check would, at best, save only $2 billion of the $1 trillion plan.

the Congressional Budget Office said the proposal to give an independent panel the power to keep Medicare spending in check would only save about $2 billion over 10 years- a drop in the bucket compared to the bill’s $1 trillion price tag.

“In CBO’s judgment, the probability is high that no savings would be realized … but there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized. Looking beyond the 10-year budget window, CBO expects that this proposal would generate larger but still modest savings on the same probabilistic basis,” CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf wrote in a letter to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Saturday.

The Blue Dogs might want to hang their hat on CBO’s more speculative cost savings projections, but those will whither away as the bill expands through Congress.

In other words, this bill will devastate the economy and drive up the deficit even further.

Promoted by Jeff

President Barack Obama refuses to release mid year budget numbers on the traditional reporting date. He has put this off until Congress goes into recess for the summer. He does so because he wants both houses of Congress to pass expensive legislation and then adjourn for their August break without the public knowing how poorly Presbud2009 is currently performing.

The Associated Press does a sound job on reporting the facts surrounding the perfidy. The Most Open Regime, er, umm, I mean Administration in US History has been far more parsimonious with data than it has with expenditures.

The administration’s annual midsummer budget update is sure to show higher deficits and unemployment and slower growth than projected in President Barack Obama’s budget in February and update in May, and that could complicate his efforts to get his signature health care and global-warming proposals through Congress.

The release of the update - usually scheduled for mid-July - has been put off until the middle of next month, giving rise to speculation the White House is delaying the bad news at least until Congress leaves town on its August 7 summer recess.

When George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece

1984

envisioned Great Britain under fascism, he had them chant a satirical slogan “Ignorance is Strength!” Orwell meant to get the reader to realize this was an awful thing. President Barack Obama has thought outside the box of common decency on this one. He sees a feature where Orwell saw a bug.

With the CBO low-balling the cost (PDF) of President Obama’s signature healthcare reform at $1Tr over the next decade, poor budgetary execution would represent an inconvenient truth. So inconvenient, that it reminds me of what happened when The Tampa Bay Buccaneers first joined the NFL.

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On Tuesday night, be given a health care bill the size of Delaware that nobody in your office had a chance to read (over 1,000 pages, in this case).

On Wednesday, watch it be jammed through various committees.

On Thursday, find out from that the nonpartisan oversight group that’s supposed to be regulating this sort of thing hasn’t been able to read it, either.

Note that none of this is considered sufficiently important enough by the Democratic leadership to be worth taking the extra time to read the bill, let alone assess it.  Because you should never let a good crisis go to waste, hey?

Moe Lane

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