YID With LID: Chief Medicare Actuary At HHS Reports Senate Obamacare Will Make Health Costs RISE

YID With LID: Chief Medicare Actuary At HHS Reports Senate Obamacare Will Make Health Costs RISE: "President Obama has said it over and over, health care reform was needed reduce the cost of health care and to bring federal spending under control. Not so fast Mr President. Richard Foster, the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid,a division of the Department of the Health and Human Services just released a study predicting overall spending on health care would rise by a total of $222 billion dollars over the next decade as a result of the House health care bill passed at the end of December. Foster also says the senate plan will drive health provider out of medicare making it harder for plan participants to find a doctor (his full report is embedded at the bottom of this post).

The CMS report estimated that national health expenditures would increase by $222 billion or 0.6 percent from 2010 to 2019.


The Senate plan purports to achieve $483 billion in Medicare savings over the next 10 years, including $118 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage plans, a program favored by Republicans that distributes Medicare benefits through private providers.

The Senate's funky math was only about $700 billion off.

Richard Foster, the chief actuary at CMS, raised doubts about whether a significant number of healthcare providers could remain profitable if the proposed Medicare cuts went into effect.


“Providers for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and, absent legislative intervention, might end their participation in the program (possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries),” Foster wrote."