Health Care Law

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Bolling Falsely Claims That The Affordable Care Act -- Which Lowers The Deficit -- Actually Costs $4 Trillion
March 30, 2012 5:05 pm ET — 20 Comments
The right-wing media remains desperate to obscure the fact that the Affordable Care Act lowers the deficit. In the latest iteration of the claim, Eric Bolling teamed up with Fox's "brain room" to inflate the cost of the health care reform law to a whopping $4 trillion.

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Affordable Care Act Lowers The Deficit

CBO: Health Care Reform Lowers The Deficit By More Than $100 Billion. In March 2011, the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation issued a joint report finding that "[o]n net, CBO and JCT's latest comprehensive estimate is that the effects of the two laws on direct spending and revenues related to health care will reduce federal deficits by $210 billion over the 2012-2021 period." The CBO subsequently determined that the Obama administration's decision to indefinitely suspend implementation of the portion of the Affordable Care Act that enacted the CLASS Act lowered the deficit savings of the Affordable Care Act by $83 billion. [Congressional Budget Office, 3/30/11, 10/31/11]

Nevertheless, Bolling Falsely Claims Affordable Care Act May Cost As Much As "$4 Trillion"

Bolling: Because The IRS Cannot Throw You In Jail For Refusing To Buy Insurance Or Pay The Penalty, The Affordable Care Act May Really Cost $3 Or $4 Trillion. From the March 29 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:

BOLLING: I spent the better part of a full day looking through this, and I found something in the health care law, in the Obamacare law, dealing with -- specifically dealing with enforcement. Brian, if you don't pay your taxes, what happens? The IRS comes after you, right?

BRIAN KILMEADE (co-host): Eventually.

BOLLING: They take you to court, eventually they take you to court, they can even garnish your wages, they can put a lien on your home, a tax lien on your property. Fast forward, the IRS will be the enforcement agent to Obamacare written in the bill. What happens if you don't buy health insurance either on the individual level or your company on a corporate level, you don't buy health insurance?

STEVE DOOCY (co-host): You pay the fine.

GRETCHEN CARLSON (co-host): You pay the penalty.

BOLLING: Well, you get assessed a fine, tax, penalty, whatever it is. What if you say, Steve, go jump in the river, IRS. I'm not paying the penalty either?

KILMEADE: Same thing.

BOLLING: No.

KILMEADE: Really?

BOLLING: Wrong. Nothing. Specifically, if I may --

DOOCY: So this is a mandate with no teeth?

KILMEADE: You're not going to sing another song, are you?

BOLLING: No, I'm going to read this. Waiver of -- this is section 1501, subsection (g)(2)(a), waiver of criminal penalties in the case of any failure by taxpayer to timely pay the penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure and the secretary shall not file a notice of lien with respect to property and respect --

DOOCY: Well, politically though, they couldn't pass a bill where you go to prison.

BOLLING: Here's the -- well, they could give it -- they could give the IRS the same teeth to enforce tax law that they do Obamacare. Here's the point, though. Forget what this means. What it means to the taxpayer, it means, the CBO intially told us it was be $938 billion, the Obamacare. They recently upped it to $1.76 trillion. If this is true and if we're reading it right and I spent a lot of time with lawyers, with the brain room, with the accountants --

CARLSON: How dare you read the bill?

BOLLING: Listen to me. This could be double. This could be a $3 trillion bill, a $4 trillion bill. Because people will specifically say, if I don't have to pay and I'm not -- the extent of the enforcement's harassing phone calls. If that's all I have to deal with, there's going to be a section of population that doesn't pay, and people who do pay are going to pick up the tab for people who don't. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 3/29/12, emphasis added]
Bolling's Argument Relies On Three Clear Falsehoods

Bolling's Falsehood: "Nothing" Happens To You If You Don't Buy Health Insurance And Then Don't Pay The Penalty. When asked what would happen if you didn't buy insurance and then didn't pay the penalty assessed to people who don't buy insurance, Bolling answered: "Nothing." In fact, the penalty will be assessed against any refund or tax credit that a taxpayer would otherwise receive. From the Joint Committee on Taxation:

Specifically, the filing of notices of liens and levies otherwise authorized for collection of taxes does not apply to the collection of this penalty. In addition, the statute waives criminal penalties for non-compliance with the requirement to maintain minimum essential coverage. However, the authority to offset refunds or credits is not limited by this provision. [Joint Committee on Taxation, 3/21/10]
Bolling's Falsehood: CBO Has Not Taken Into Account The Effect Of The Enforcement Mechanism For The Individual Mandate. Bolling claimed that, after having "spent a lot of time with lawyers, with the [Fox] brain room, with the accountants," if the effect of people saying "I don't have to pay" were truly taken into account, the CBO estimate of the cost of the bill "could be double. This could be a $3 trillion bill, a $4 trillion bill." Actually, the CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation have already taken this into account and have estimated that "collections from those penalties will be about $4 billion per year." From an April 2010 CBO report:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have estimated that about 21 million nonelderly residents will be uninsured in 2016, but the majority of them will not be subject to the penalty. Unauthorized immigrants, for example, are exempted from the mandate to obtain health insurance. Others will be subject to the mandate but exempted from the penalty -- for example, because they will have income low enough that they are not required to file an income tax return, because they are members of Indian tribes, or because the premium they would have to pay would exceed a specified share of their income (initially 8 percent in 2014 and indexed over time). CBO and JCT estimate that between 13 million and 14 million of the uninsured in 2016 will qualify for one or more of those exemptions.

Of the remaining 7 million to 8 million uninsured, some individuals will be granted exemptions from the penalty because of hardship, and others will be exempted from the mandate on the basis of their religious beliefs. Among the uninsured who do not obtain an exemption, many will voluntarily report on their tax returns that they are uninsured and pay the amount owed. However, other individuals will try to avoid making payments. Therefore, the estimates presented here account for likely compliance rates, as well as the ability of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to administer and collect the penalty. After accounting for all of those factors, CBO and JCT estimate that about 4 million people will pay a penalty because they will be uninsured in 2016 (a figure that includes uninsured dependents who have the penalty paid on their behalf).

CBO and JCT estimate that total collections from those penalties will be about $4 billion per year over the 2017-2019 period. [CBO, 4/30/10]
Bolling's Falsehood: The CBO Has Already Increased The Estimate For The Affordable Care Act To $1.7 Trillion. Bolling claimed that "CBO intially told us it was be $938 billion, Obamacare. They recently upped it to $1.76 trillion." In fact, Bolling was referring to just the gross cost of the insurance coverage provision, not the entire bill. In addition, in the report to which Bolling is referring, the CBO estimated that the insurance coverage provisions will cost "just under $1.1 trillion," less than previously estimated. [Media Matters, 3/16/12]

Even The Conservative National Review Online Acknowledges That The Talking Point That The Affordable Care Act's Cost Has Doubled Is Nonsense. From a post by National Review Online's Patrick Brennan:
The House Republican Policy Committee, for instance, put out a statement claiming that "the new CBO projection estimates that the law will cost $1.76 trillion over 10 years -- well above the $940 billion Democrats originally claimed."

This claim, that the CBO's 2012 estimate suggests Obamacare will cost twice as much as originally projected when the bill was passed in 2010, has been widely trumpeted, by some rather doggedly, as another Obamacare failure, but unfortunately, it's entirely dishonest accounting, as a range of liberal bloggers have pointed out. [National Review Online, 3/20/12]

[Havakasha]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...g.html?hpid=z2
Posted at 11:12 AM ET, 04/02/2012
The GOP’s `repeal and replace’ fraud
By Jonathan Bernstein
Almost fifteen months ago, the new Republican majority in the House passed a go-nowhere repeal of the health law and promised to begin work on a replacement, which would entail holding “hearings in Washington and around the country” to draft a Republican version of health care reform. This hasn’t happened.

Several months ago, a key GOP subcommittee chair pledged that Republicans would be rolling out their replacement ideas over the next few months in preparation for the introduction of a bill later this spring. This hasn’t happened, either.

Which raises a question: Will Republicans really have the chutzpah to run on “repeal and replace” for a second consecutive Congressional election cycle after doing absolutely nothing about the “replace” part for two years?

The most recent promise of a “replace” plan was made back in January by Rep. Joe Pitts, chair of the Health Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee, back in January. Since then? His subcommittee has held a hearing on generic drugs, one on traumatic brain injury, and even one on the “Current State of Cosmetics.” I’m sure those were all important. But replacing the health law? No, somehow that seems to have slipped off the agenda again.

The truth is that “replace” has always been a fraud, cooked up presumably because a flat-out repeal of health care reform polls much worse than replacing it with some unspecified legislation which would presumably contain all of the popular items in the health lawwithout any of the costs. Since such a bill is impossible, however, the timeline for when the bill will be developed keeps slipping into the unspecified future.

Sometimes Republicans admit that they really have no intention of passing a serious bill to replace the health law if they get the votes need to repeal it or if the Supreme Court tosses it out, as Mitch McConnell did last week. But for the most part, “replace” is still their official policy.

As Greg has been noting, if the Supreme Court really does toss out health care reform in June, this is no longer going to be just a symbolic question; Republicans would get their way on the repeal of Obama’s signature domestic reform. If that happens, maybe everybody will then realize that the vow to “replace” health reform has always been a fraud.

[SiriuslyLong]

Statism Goes to Court

Health care should not be a federal concern at all.

"Well, I can’t imagine that that — that the Commerce Clause would — would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.”

This was Solicitor General Donald Verrilli on Day Two of the great Obamacare case. At issue was Affordable Care Act’s most controversial aspect: the “individual mandate” — the requirement that Americans purchase health insurance as a condition of living in their country. The SG was being pummeled by Justice Antonin Scalia.

Pummeling was the order of the day for Verrilli. From the moment he rose to deliver the most important argument of his professional life, he seemed tongue-tied; he could barely get through “May it please the Court” without sputtering. It is hard, even for a lawyer as fine as Verrilli, to defend the indefensible. Yet, as he argued with Scalia, the SG grabbed on to a hidden truth: He and his fellow progressives are already way, way ahead. They may not win this skirmish over the individual mandate. But there is the battle, and then there is the war. For statism, the war is still going very well.

The “deeply embedded social norm” to which the SG referred was another government mandate: The 1986 law demanding that hospitals, without compensation, treat emergency patients who lack insurance or the capacity to pay. It was a telling moment: The hullaballoo over the individual mandate is a case of noticing the barn door open about a quarter-century after the horse has galloped away.

So who are “the uninsured”? They sort into two categories, alternatively emphasized, depending on what the Left is trying to accomplish that day. If the aim is to achieve “social justice” (i.e., the redistribution of wealth from the producers to the takers), they are “the poor.” If the aim is to manufacture social injustice, they are the “free riders” — “free,” once our coveted condition, is now an epithet. The “free riders” rationally choose not to insure themselves, figuring that they are young, healthy, not likely to need much medical attention, and able to get treatment in the event of an emergency.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...rew-c-mccarthy

[Havakasha]

Obama's Individual Mandate Not First Federal Health Care Mandate

RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR 04/ 1/12 08:32 AM ET

WASHINGTON — The individual insurance requirement that the Supreme Court is reviewing isn't the first federal mandate involving health care.

There's a Medicare payroll tax on workers and employers, for example, and a requirement that hospitals provide free emergency services to indigents. Health care is full of government dictates, some arguably more intrusive than President Barack Obama's overhaul law.

It's a wrinkle that has caught the attention of the justices.

Most of the mandates apply to providers such as hospitals and insurers. For example, a 1990s law requires health plans to cover at least a 48-hour hospital stay for new mothers and their babies. Such requirements protect some consumers while indirectly raising costs for others.

One mandate affects just about everybody: Workers must pay a tax to finance Medicare, which collects about $200 billion a year.

It's right on your W-2 form, line 6, "Medicare tax withheld." Workers must pay it even if they don't have health insurance. Employees of a company get to split the tax with their employer. The self-employed owe the full amount, 2.9 percent of earnings.

Lindsey Donner, a small-business owner from San Diego, pays the Medicare tax although she and her husband are uninsured. Donner, 27, says she doesn't see much difference between the mandate that workers help finance Medicare and the health care law's requirement that nearly everyone has to have some sort of health insurance.

"My understanding of what is going on in the Supreme Court is that it seems to be something of a semantics issue," she said. "Ultimately, I don't see the big difference. If I am paying for Medicare, why can't I also be paying into something that would help me right now or in five years if I want to have children?"

Donner is a copy writer for businesses; her husband specializes in graphics design. In the past they had a health plan with a high deductible, but they found they were paying monthly premiums for insurance they never used – something she said they couldn't afford on a tight budget.


Under the law, people such as Donner and her husband would have to get insurance or pay a fine. But they may qualify for federal subsidies to help pay premiums for policies that would be more comprehensive. Preventive care would be covered with no co-payments.

"We have jobs, we pay our bills, we pay our taxes," said Donner. "Yet it is very difficult to find affordable, reasonable health care."

There's no question the Medicare payroll tax is a government mandate, said Mark Hayes, former chief health counsel for the Republican staff of the Senate Finance Committee.

But he makes a distinction between the payroll tax and the individual health insurance mandate in Obama's health care law.

Congress used more clearly defined constitutional powers when it created Medicare. "The power to tax and the power to spend," Hayes said. "Here, with the individual mandate, it's a different question – regulating interstate commerce. This is a novel question from a legal standpoint."

Obama's law makes health insurance both a right and a responsibility for most. It would provide coverage to more than 90 percent of the population, subsidizing private insurance for millions. But it also requires nearly everyone to carry health insurance, either through an employer or a government program, or by buying an individual policy.

The mandate is well within the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce, the administration and the law's supporters contend. Opponents say Congress overstepped constitutional bounds by effectively requiring individuals to purchase a particular product.

Supreme Court justices are trying to determine the distinction between Obama's law and other mandates, and whether it makes a difference.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy raised the matter during oral arguments last week.

Ginsburg brought up Social Security as an example, likening it to a government old-age annuity that everyone is forced to purchase.

"It just seems very strange to me that there's no question we can have a Social Security system (despite) all the people who say: `I'm being forced to pay for something I don't want,'" she said.

"There's something very odd about that, that the government can take over the whole thing and we all say, `Oh, yes that's fine,' but if the government wants to ... preserve private insurers, it can't do that."

Kennedy mused that Congress could have created a Medicare-style program for the uninsured, run exclusively by the government without the involvement of private insurers.

"Let's assume that (Congress) could use the tax power to raise revenue and to just have a national health service, single payer," said Kennedy. "How does that factor into our analysis? In one sense, it can be argued that this is what the government is doing; it ought to be honest about the power that it's using and use the correct power.

"On the other hand, it means that since ... Congress can do it anyway, we give a certain amount of latitude," Kennedy continued. "I'm not sure which way the argument goes."

The case may well turn on how Kennedy decides.

Social Security and Medicare are no longer controversial mandates because they are part of the social fabric, said Hayes, the former GOP congressional aide. Not so the health care law's mandate. "Today, this is controversial because it is novel from a legal standpoint and also new from a societal standpoint," he said.

The distinction frustrates supporters of the health care law.

"It's so crazy to think that a society that has Social Security and Medicare would not find this (law) constitutional," said MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who advised both the Obama administration and Massachusetts lawmakers as they developed the state mandate in the 2006 law that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney championed as governor.

"The payroll tax is worse than the mandate, because that is a program where we take your money and there is no ability to get out of it," Gruber said. Citizens can avoid the health insurance mandate by paying a penalty to the Internal Revenue Service.

Other federal health care mandates include:

_ The 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. It requires nearly all hospitals to treat and stabilize anyone needing emergency care, regardless of ability to pay or legal U.S. residency. Critics call it an unfunded mandate. It was part of a budget law signed by President Ronald Reagan.

_ The 1996 Mental Health Parity Act. It prohibits group health plans from setting lower annual or lifetime dollar limits for mental health benefits as compared with medical and surgical benefits.

_ The 1996 Newborns' and Mothers' Health Protection Act. It requires plans offering maternity coverage to pay for at a least a 48-hour hospital stay following most normal deliveries, and 96 hours following a Caesarean section. The mental health parity and maternal health laws were signed by President Bill Clinton.

[Havakasha]

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/02/opinio...html?hpt=hp_c1

After the mandate, government-run health care would grow
By David Frum, CNN Contributor
updated 9:42 PM EDT, Mon April 2, 2012


The U.S. Supreme Court may strike down the mandate to buy health insurance
David Frum says elimination of mandate would spur more government-funded health care
Without private insurance, more people will look to get Medicaid coverage, he says
Frum: The court's free-market boosters could spark huge government expansion
Editor's note: David Frum, a CNN contributor, is a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He was a special assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002 and is the author of six books, including "Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again."
(CNN) -- Suppose the Supreme Court does rule that the health care mandate is unconstitutional? What happens then?
(I'm not saying that they will, but let's play "what if?")
The famous individual mandate is just one piece of the new health care law enacted in 2010. Take away the mandate, and here are two principal elements left behind:
-- A huge expansion of the Medicaid program. The majority of those who'd gain health coverage under the new health care law, an estimated 18 million people, would gain it from being enrolled in Medicaid, the health care program for the poor. Even before the new health care law, Medicaid was a huge program, covering one in six Americans. It's on its way to becoming bigger still, whatever happens to the individual mandate.

David Frum
-- Tough new rules on insurance companies. The new health care law forbids insurers to refuse coverage on the basis of "pre-existing conditions." All applicants must be accepted, and they must be covered at the same price as the other members of the insured group.
Now let's war-game what happens post-mandate.
1. The private insurance market will crash in a spectacular train wreck.
Faced with big new costs and deprived of their expected new revenues from the mandate, insurance companies will have to raise prices. Faced with rising prices, employers will cut back coverage.
The 2010 law imposes new obligations on employers to provide health insurance but also presents employers with an option to escape those obligations by paying a (comparatively) small fine. As insurance costs surge in a post-mandate world, more employers will take advantage of that option. Their employees will join the new market for individual care, the famous health care "exchanges."
Minus the mandate, the policies on offer in the exchanges will be unexpectedly expensive. Minus the mandate, many individuals will choose not to buy. The law offers subsidies to buyers who cannot afford the full cost of the new policies. Minus the mandate, those subsidies will cost much more than expected.
2. The Medicaid program will grow.
The new health care law dramatically expands eligibility for Medicaid. In a post-mandate world, with employers dropping coverage and the individual market careening into dysfunction, Medicaid will likely grow faster than ever.
CNN Explains: Health care reform
Costs of the Medicaid program are divided between the federal and state governments. As Medicaid surges, those governments will face an agonizing dilemma: Raise taxes to pay for all those new applicants or reduce coverage, leaving millions of people to clinics and charity.
3. Meanwhile, the Medicare time bomb will continue to tick.
The U.S. already has a single-payer health care system. It's called Medicare, and even today, it is one of the largest single-payer systems on Earth, enrolling more than 47 million people. As more and more of the baby boomers turn 65, the program is scheduled to expand rapidly -- to more than 63 million people by 2020 and more than 80 million by 2030.
We are headed, it would seem, to a post-mandate future that looks something like this:
Medicare will provide fairly generous government health coverage to about one-quarter of the population.
Medicaid will provide much less generous government coverage to one-quarter of the population.
The population outside Medicaid and Medicare will subdivide into two main groups:
The affluent and those whose labor is greatly valuable to their employers will be covered by an ever-more-expensive and ever-shrinking private-insurance market.
The people who can't pay themselves and whose employers won't pay for them will drop out of the private market, and either look for ways to qualify for Medicaid or wait and pray until they qualify for Medicare.
Political pressures will induce politicians to open Medicaid to more and more uninsured people. Fiscal pressures will force politicians to make Medicare less generous and more Medicaid-like.
If the Supreme Court rules unconstitutional the plan for universal coverage through private insurance, the U.S. will continue to evolve toward a government-led system -- albeit one much more expensive, and much less satisfactory, than the government systems of other advanced democracies.
Perhaps after a decade or two of discontent, somebody else will try another reform. But this time, the reform will proceed as an outright government program. There won't be any choice, if the Supreme Court of 2012 precludes as unconstitutional the private-sector alternative -- meaning that today's would-be champions of the free market will have unwittingly brought about the grandest expansion of government control since the 1930s.

[Havakasha]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1399895.html


The Government Accountability Office, which audits federal spending, has concluded that the national debt would rise precipitously if President Obama's health care legislation doesn't go into effect.

A report titled "The Federal Government's Long-Term Fiscal Outlook" states that several parts of the health plan "were designed to control the growth of health care costs. The full implementation and effectiveness of these cost-control provisions... would slow the growth in federal health care spending over the long term."

If the legislation were thrown out, though, the forecast becomes considerably more gloomy. The report does not go into detail about the consequences of an invalidated law — but as TPM reports, it clearly implies that "if key cost-control measures in the law, and other automatic cuts to Medicare spending baked into current law, are ignored, or overridden by Congress, the implications for the national debt are vast."

Or, in the dry language of the GAO:

These concerns are reflected in our Alternative simulation, which, consistent with CBO’s and the CMS Actuary’s alternative scenarios, assumes that certain cost-containment mechanisms are not sustained over the long term. Spending on health care grows much more rapidly under this more pessimistic set of assumptions. Absent changes to these programs, spending on Medicare and Medicaid under the Alternative simulation grows to over 8 percent of GDP by 2030.
The health care bill's fate rests in the hands of the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule on its constitutionality in June. On Tuesday, President Obama expressed confidence that the court would uphold his signature legislative achievement.