WyBlog

Obama plan could add to cost of premiums

Well blow me down. The headline "Obama plan could add to cost of premiums" blared out at me from the front page of today's Star-Ledger. It's an Associated Press analysis (so I can't quote it without incurring the wrath of their lawyers) that details how much more our health insurance will cost if all of Obama's stated requirements are passed into law.

See, requiring insurers to cover all comers regardless of medical history and pay all costs for preventive care means they'll have to fork out more money in claims. Ergo, they'll have to charge higher rates to cover those claims. The experts cited by AP figure premiums will go up at least 10 to 15 percent. Lovely.

I don't know which was more of a shock though; that Obama's plan won't actually save us any money, or that the Star-Ledger published the news in such a prominent way. They usually bury stuff critical of Obama or his policies on page 53 next to the strip club ads.

As for the purported hundreds of millions of dollars in savings Obama says he can wring out of Medicare, here's another report from McClatchy that says those saving aren't likely to materialize either. Any cuts in Medicare or Medicaid, even to reduce "waste and inefficiency", would be politically unpopular in Congress. And the president conveniently forgot to mention that a key component of his "savings" plan actually takes the form of a significant tax surcharge on higher income Americans.

Then there's the back-loading of the costs in his plan. Obama likes to emphasize the potential savings over the next 10 years. But the McClatchy analysis shows expenses skyrocketing between 2020 and 2029 as health care costs increase faster than income growth does. Projections show Obamacare running trillion dollar deficits by 2030, just when the Social Security and Medicare trust funds should be running on fumes too.

So as much as Obama says he doesn't want to "kick the can further down the road" that's essentially what he's doing when it comes to funding his health care plan. Or maybe he's just hoping a soda tax will bring in all the revenue he'll ever need.

Posted at 14:38 by Chris Wysocki   [/obama_watch]   Comments | Archived | Perm Link |
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