There needs to be a subforum for gloating, but since that doesn’t exist I’ll use this forum.
A big part of the health reform bill was just to change health management and delivery to improve efficiency over time. The goal was to slow cost growth.
According to the Medicare Trustees report of 2010, before Obamacare Medicare was set to make up 11% of GDP by 2080. After Obamacare it is only set to be 6% of GDP by 2080, up from about 3.5% now.
Medicare had an unfunded liability of $37 trillion or so before Obamacare, with an 80% reduction that means we may have saved $30 trillion in medicare over the next 75 years. I hope the same benefits are going to be seen in medicaid projections (which show tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities) as well as US business competitiveness, since our health care costs put us at a disadvantage globally. I don’t know if the same benefits will be seen in medicaid and the private sector, but I would assume so. If so, the savings could be $100 trillion or more economy wide over the century.
Awesome. While the GOP is pushing supply side tax cuts and opposing Obamacare, it is the dems pushing policies that actually cut the long term deficit. Health care reform, tax reform, investments in the future to lower costs.
As usual the Dems are the responsible adults in the room. The Repubs just want more money for the rich and powerful, regardless of what damage it causes. They made it clear when they said" deficits don’t matter’. That is their claims when they are in office lining their pockets. As soon as they are out of power, they point to the deficit as a huge problem that will kill us all.
Projections of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid for 70 years in the future are meaningless. We don’t know - we can’t know - what changes will take place politically, socially, or financially in the next 70 years. Many who will be receiving benefits in 2080 are not even born today. 70 years ago, it was 1940, and I feel confident that projections from that time bear no resemblance to the reality today.
And besides, Medicare and Medicaid won’t exist in 2080; we’ll all be under a single-payer UHC from birth to death.
Does anyone really believe that Obamcare will save us money? Seriously? When was a government agency ever able to do something more efficiently that private enterprise?
First: You’re stupid enough to trust a chart made by the GOP specifically to make Health Care Reform look complicated.
Second: Health care is complicated, it’s a very huge issue.
Third: Government healthcare systems around the world are around twice as efficient as the system we use. This is a fact. I’m sorry if that goes against your bullshit ideology, but deal with it.
Fourth: The system implemented is still private, it just puts some regulations on the current system we use.
Fifth: Disbelieving something because you haven’t bothered to educate yourself on the issue is a pretty piss-poor way to lead your life.
All the time. Especially considering that “save money” and 'efficiency" aren’t even the same thing.
Like it or not, government is perfectly capable of performing various services better than private industry; and the evidence from all over the world is that running a health care system is one of those things. Americans pay more money for worse care thanks to our free-market-at-any-cost fetish.
I started to smile right after reading this sentence, and Plan B just helped keep it there.
If these numbers prove to be accurate, I’ll have to spend the rest of my life laughing loudly at conservatives every time they try and bring up health care or fiscal responsibility.
I supported health care reform, would like to see some additional steps taken, and I think this OP is asinine.
None of the major provisions have gone into law, we have absolutely no real experience with how the law will change the cost of delivering medical care in the United States, and these cost projection curves are merely estimates of future liabilities based upon nothing but the best guess of the Medicare trustees. They aren’t based on any radically new data, so a huge variance in the estimate for liabilities in 2050 just points to questions about the validity of the estimates put out by these folks rather than supports the correctness of the passage of health care reform.
Touting this change in cost-projections as a triumph of health reform is idiotic.
This is pretty much a titanic load of hroseshit. I’d klike to even argue against it, but it pretty much fails to be lauighable. IN the future, perhaps you’d like to celebrate savings after they actually appear, and not in wholly fictitious projections? Or perhaops, before cursing the conservatives who argue their points, you might want to have “cites” from something more reputable than Leftist spinning the most carefully selected aspects of a report?
For my economics, I find it extremely instructive to always go to Megan McArdle. She’s a liberal, yet very often opposed to any politicizing of economics. She further explains complex subjects well and has a good track record of predictions -principally because she makes them very carefully. She msiot certainly can’t be argued to have some knee-jerk conservative bias.
And, unfortunately, both Krugman and Kos are full full of shit. It’d be ncie if they weren’t, but they are.
What you are all missing, absurdly, is that the medicare trustees’ report must assume, no matter what, that the claimed savings will be there, even if there is no chance in hell it will. They are required to do so, just as the CBo is very often required to make nonsensical assumptions, as happened during the ridiculous gaming of the CBO score earlier this year in support of the bill.
She points out that Krugman hgilariously made this same point… a day after he completely missed the same fact applies for the Trustee’s Report. The second link is actually about Krugman’s questioning why Paul Ryan, whom he considers an obvious “flimflammer” didn’t do things he actually did in fact do.
McArdle, for reasons which may be obvious to some, is one of the few liberals I truly and deeply respect.
Said by somebody who has probably not had to deal with the Reagan/Bush “outsourcing” disaster. Here’s how those contracts ‘work’: The government solicits bids for performing work that was once done by government employees who were trained for the job and had tenure and structure. Contractors submit proposals as to how they will perform the job (an SOP) and the resumes of all the people they are proposing to be involved in both the management and the execution of the contract.
With me so far?
Company A is awarded the contract. Problem is, the people that Company A included in their proposal to execute the contract have not yet been hired. The resumes of the managing personnel are a) hopelessly plumped up, b) resumes for persons who no longer work for the company, or c) persons who work for the company but are attached to other contracts and won’t be working on this one.
The company then engages in a mad scramble to hire cheap personnel and procure all the tools and equipment that they promised to deliver as part of the contract. As a result, the government ends up with a semi-qualified crew working with inadequate tools for less money than the company stated they would pay, but the company still gets the contracted amount from the government (read “taxpayer”). The substituted management personnel likely do not meet the qualifications laid out in the solicitation, but are granted waivers, and are of course paid less than was expected, so personnel management and contract management are both neglected and poorly executed, leading to endless meetings with disgruntled government employees who are extremely unhappy with the fact that the contractor is there in the first place.
The contractor’s lawyer(s) then pick the contract apart to find loopholes that allows them to ignore some of the work unless a contract amendment is issued for an exhorbitant amount of extra money.
Result: PROFIT! For the contractor. And a serious fucking for the taxpayer.
As a one-time English teacher, let me give you kudos for an accurate topic sentence introducing your post. Few people construct posts in proper essay format any more, and it’s a real pleasure to see someone accurately identifying what they will be arguing.
I saw a long program , last night, on CSPAN with the heads of the trustees on the panel and various involved parties in the audience. One in the audience was the head of a lot of hospitals, what he would get for lowering prices to Medicare and Medicade customers was 34 million new customers with insurance. That was a great offset. He was pleased even though he had to make price concessions. They discussed many money eaters in the system ,like doctors directing tests to labs that charge exorbitant prices for tests that are not even required. The health care system is dealing with the wasted money in health care. it is good to see.
If you go to Megan McArdle for economic guidance, it is no wonder that you are completely moronic on the topic. This may be why you find yourself completely unable to argue against the OP.
Furthermore, Megan McArdle is not a liberal at all. If she were, you would be be saying that she is full of shit.
I’m a Canadian and so, like 98% of my countrymen, am a big supporter of government-run health insurance.
But, come on, guys. Saying NOW that Obamacare has “Saved us from bankruptcy” is beyond retarded and into flat-out insane. You’ve not a damned clue where demographics, politics, and acts of God will lead the U.S. health care system in 50 years.
Those of you who didn’t bother to read smiling bandit’s links should do so, because McArdle’s points are dead on.
Thank you for admitting you have no arguement, and therefore must mock my mediocre typing skills instead. Grammar arguments are the first refuge of the losing side.
Pit or not, if the only argument you can come up with is namecalling and ignoring other people’s actual arguments, then there’s really nothing left to say, is there? And I lvoe the concept that liberals are so correct and unanimous that they can never disagree, and therefore any liberal who does disagree with the speaker is not a liberal.
Ah, Lefty arrogance. I love how the Party of Tolerance is ultimately full of smug, self-centered assholes fully convinced of their own superiority and the obviousness of their correctness.
I have no doubt that private enterprise could exploit the National Parks better than the National Park Service, but I doubt anyone would like to visit 392 strip mines, oil wells, toxic waste dumps and asphalt deserts. No thank you, I would rather pour your taxes into the existing socialist money pit.
