quote:

ORIGINAL: Brain
If people are wary of the costs as you say it's because Republicans are lying about it, that's the main reason.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Sanity


Look at the deficits now. This bill will add to those deficits - that's a real problem.

And name the last government program that spent less than was forecast?

quote:

ORIGINAL: housesub4you

It's funny how they don't have time to read "this" bill but had no problem voting on the Patriot Act without reading it and pushed it through so very very fast

quote:

ORIGINAL: Sanity

That's funny. Every fact that leaks out about how awful this bill is the fault of someone else. Anyone who tells the truth about this legislative train wreck has to be a lying Republican...

What a hoot.

Look - the Congressional Budget Office is completely nonpartisan - check their figures. As written, Obamacare will add $1.3 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years.

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/104xx/doc10430/House_Tri-Committee-Rangel.pdf

If people are wary about the costs it's because they have the facts.

Republicans aren't the ones who are lying...

quote:

ORIGINAL: Brain
If people are wary of the costs as you say it's because Republicans are lying about it, that's the main reason.

quote:

Have to keep costs down, you know.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lorr47
Go to the just released Fact Check.  One after another republican statements found wrong, inaccurate and deceiving as to Health Care.  Since the republicans want to be scum sucking maggots, calling them the liars they are does not seem all that egregious.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Sanity


Would this supposed "fact check" be on the same far, far left web site on which you've learned your charming debating techniques?

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lorr47
Go to the just released Fact Check.  One after another republican statements found wrong, inaccurate and deceiving as to Health Care.  Since the republicans want to be scum sucking maggots, calling them the liars they are does not seem all that egregious.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lorr47
Merely adopting your methodology.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Sanity


My methodology? Not even close.

Your calling people scum sucking maggots sounds a lot like growing desperation from a person who feels they are losing a debate. I've noticed you flirting with such TOS violations for the last day or two now.

You're really feeling that your argument is lost, aren't you?

My advice it to just walk away in that case, and thus avoid invoking moderation.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lorr47
Merely adopting your methodology.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lorr47
I am not worried about health care reform because the more republicans mis characterize the facts the more likely republicans will get caught.  Did I hurt your feeling by criticizing republicans?

quote:

Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
CBO and IMAC
Peter R. Orszag, Director

This morning, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed proposals to shift more decision-making out of politics and toward a body like the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC) put forward by the Administration. CBO noted that this type of approach could lead to significant long-term savings in federal spending on health care and that the available evidence implies that a substantial share of spending on health care contributes little, if anything, to the overall health of the nation. This supports what President Obama has said all along: we can reduce waste and unnecessary spending without reducing quality of care and benefits.

In part because legislation under consideration already includes substantial savings in Medicare over the next decade, CBO found modest additional medium-term savings from this proposal -- $2 billion over 10 years. The point of the proposal, however, was never to generate savings over the next decade. (Indeed, under the Administration’s approach, the IMAC system would not even begin to make recommendations until 2015.) Instead, the goal is to provide a mechanism for improving quality of care for beneficiaries and reducing costs over the long term. In other words, in the terminology of our belt-and-suspenders approach to a fiscally responsible health reform, the IMAC is a game changer not a scoreable offset.

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.) And if you look back at recent history, one can see why an empowered advisory council would be useful. For example, for the better part of this decade, MedPAC has recommended reducing overpayments to insurance companies for Medicare Advantage plans – to equate those payments with the cost of covering the same beneficiary under traditional Medicare. Yet, nothing happened, costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. We can’t afford that type of inertia.

The bottom line is that it is very rare for CBO to conclude that a specific legislative proposal would generate significant long-term savings so it is noteworthy that, with some modifications, CBO reached such a conclusion with regard to the IMAC concept.

A final note is worth underscoring. As a former CBO director, I can attest that CBO is sometimes accused of a bias toward exaggerating costs and underestimating savings. Unfortunately, parts of today’s analysis from CBO could feed that perception. For example, and without specifying precisely how the various modifications would work, CBO somehow concluded that the council could "eventually achieve annual savings equal to several percent of Medicare spending...[which] would amount to tens of billions of dollars per year after 2019." Such savings are welcome (and rare!), but it is also the case that (for good reason) CBO has restricted itself to qualitative, not quantitative, analyses of long-term effects from legislative proposals. In providing a quantitative estimate of long-term effects without any analytical basis for doing so, CBO seems to have overstepped.