The New Media Journal | CBO: House Healthcare Reform Adds $89 Billion to Debt

The New Media Journal | CBO: House Healthcare Reform Adds $89 Billion to Debt: "While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (P-CA) has repeatedly said that healthcare reform would be deficit neutral, the House of Representatives passed an additional Medicare reform bill last week that would interact with the previously passed healthcare bill (HR3962) to add $89 billion to budget deficits in the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

HR3961, the Medicare Physicians Payment Rates Reform Act of 2009, is referred to as the “doc fix,” and is characterized on Pelosi’s Web site as “companion legislation” to the larger health care bill. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) calls it a “fiscal shell game.”

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the legislation will cost $210 billion dollars over a decade to implement on its own. Taken together with the Affordable Healthcare for America Act (the healthcare reform bill), it would add $89 billion to the federal debt between 2010 and 2019.

'CBO estimates that enacting both HR3961 and HR3962 would add $89 billion to budget deficits over the 2010–2019 period,' the CBO told Ryan in a Nov. 19 letter.

The bill amends the current “sustainable growth rate,” a mathematical formula that determines changes in the rate of pay to physicians serving Medicare patients. The payment rates were expected to get slashed in 2010, but this bill also prevents that from happening.

In a statement she released on the day the bill passed, Pelosi said, “Strengthening Medicare for generations to come is essential to our efforts to reforming healthcare for all Americans.”

Ryan, the ranking member on the House Committee on the Budget, asked the CBO to analyze how the bill would affect the House's overall healthcare reform effort financially.

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf sent his response Thursday, with the new combined numbers. He wrote that the proposed changes to the SGR “would result in significantly higher payment rates for physicians than those that would result under current law. The CBO estimates that enacting HR3961 (“doc fix”) by itself would cost $210 billion over the 2010-2019 period.”

Additionally, Elmendorf said HR3962, the larger healthcare reform bill, “by itself, would reduce federal budget deficits by $109 billion over the 2010-2019 period through its direct effects on revenue and spending.”

Taken together, then, they “would add $89 billion to budget deficits over the 2010-2019 period,” according to the CBO.

By 2019, the combination of the House healthcare reform bill and the bill adjusting the Medicare payments to doctors would be adding $23 billion per year to the national debt, according to CBO. In the years after that, the amount the two bills would add to the debt would increase every year."