Harrycare Breaks the Bank - HUMAN EVENTS

Harrycare Breaks the Bank - HUMAN EVENTS: "On Friday, the Chief Actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) released his report on the estimated financial impact of the Senate’s health care bill passed on Christmas Eve on a party-line vote. Unlike the Congressional Budget Office’s score estimating the bill would reduce the deficit over the first ten years, CMS estimates that the measure will add $280 billion to the federal deficit from 2010-2019.

Like the CBO score, CMS’s estimate largely masks the true cost and cynicism of the bill because non-partisan government agencies have little room to make assumptions outside of the pure text of the proposed legislation. However, even more aggressively than the CBO’s commentary, the CMS actuary offers harsh words and stern warnings about this bill’s true likely cost and crowd-out effects on the private insurance market.

The costs and so-called savings in Harrycare, officially titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”) are broken down into 2 major categories: Coverage and Medicare, the former representing government costs and the latter theoretically representing savings. There are smaller categories for Medicaid/CHIP (separate from the expansion of Medicaid which falls under Coverage), and the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (“CLASS”) program. The provisions for each category are a minefield of uncertainty, with real-world outcomes likely to cost the taxpayer far more than any current government estimate."