[quote=burghMan]
There is nothing in that mishmash of statistics or anything in those links that supports your initial claim that ACA is a $1 trillion annual unfunded liability. The first link was about the overall national debt and had nothing specific to ACA. None of the links addresses the total cost of ACA or any debt created by it.[/quote]
Did you look at the per year change in the national debt relative to that link and the timing of it(what year it occurred in)?
[quote=burghMan]The overall national debt is a more interesting topic in these times. Why are deficits growing even with a strong economy? Because we have a president that is running the country like he ran all of his failed businesses.[/quote] – Red herring, off topic. Take a look at what the addition is per year and who was in charge at the time. I do agree that the 2017 tax reduction was not a good idea, but that is off current topic, thereby red herring.
You choose to address only the first link but not the others.. and hope that it causes people to ignore the others. You also ignore the section:
NOTE: of more than 10.6 million people who had added coverage through the exchanges early 2019 – 87% qualified for premium subsidies, and 52% of current exchange enrollees are receiving subsidies in 2019. Subsidies are for incomes up to 250% of poverty level (SD = $24,036 – threshold = $60,090 – 2 parents, 2 children). In San Diego County, 13.8% of population is below the poverty level.
Question: What percentage of population is below 2.5 times the poverty level?
Answer: Much more than you think. Median income El Cajon=$46K, Escondido=$49K, La Mesa=$55K… Median => 50% of population above median, 50% of population below median – definition of statistical median).
How much of the total US population is below 2.5% of the poverty level in their area? Want to try a WAG on that?
Obamacare could have reduced costs, however it had nothing in the bill to reduce the cost of health care. It was hoping to do it through better health management but ignored what happens when you put a big pocket payer between the person receiving care and the entity giving the care. What was controlled was the profit margins that health care insurers make, but not the price on the health care itself, which is why generic medicine prices have skyrocketed.
By the way, on the reference to your article, take a look at the line under “The following five new ACA taxes would bring in an additional $567 billion in revenue” titled “Raising medical deduction limit to 10 percent – $104 billion”. How is that a tax? How does that increase revenue from taxes? It doesn’t. It actually reduces tax revenue because it allows people to write off a greater percentage of their health care costs, reducing their taxes – and thereby the money the fed gets from taxes.
The line item “Reduce Medicare payments – $197 billion” is not a savings because the medicare costs (that the payments were covering) was transferred to the ACA.
Finally, in all of the links that your article has, where are the links that actually support the contentions of the author of your article? The author has the quote “The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said that the ACA would reduce the debt by $143 billion”, but the link goes to a general discussion of what the CBO does. In other locations where the authors statements kind of match the supporting info, the link may go to the supporting CBO info.
I also note that your article says nothing about subsidies and cost sharing arrangements under the ACA. This is the big elephant in the room that I am talking about. A rough estimate using existing population demographics shows that what we are being told is not accurate, but is seems to get close to the budget deficit increase. This is why the ref to the budge deficit.
So here is one from the CBO.. take a look at ‘Major Health Care Programs’ under Outlay Projections – about half way down. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55331
If you look at the next graph down titled “Increases in Federal Revenues”, you’ll see that currently, the tax on High Premium Health Insurance Plans is negligible, though it will grow after 2026. This make the authors claim of current benefits from the tax questionable.
I looked through many of the other CBO estimates and found that they were, at times, really weak and potentially really off. Here is the results on repealing the ACA mandate: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53300
There is a claim that nongroup market insurance premiums would increase about 10% in most years.. so far a decrease is currently projected for this year. It is interesting to note that this is a 10% increase over 10 years when we have been currently seeing an increase of 20% or more per year under the mandate.
The actual costs of the ACA are a very sensitive subject to those who put it in place. The full effects are hard to determine as can be seen by the CBOs $930Billion, no $1.76Trillion, no $1.1Trillion estimates.
Your quote:
The worst case estimate from the CBO is $1.76 Trillion over an eleven year period…an order of magnitude less than ucodegen’s numbers and much closer to spdrun’s numbers.
May be accurate by 2026, however the CBO slides it through at $1.76 trillion by projecting the numbers to 2026. As of currently, it doesn’t look like it will make it, and is currently running over by nearly $1trillion annually. Again referencing the revenue portion from the CBO, which in my opinion are a bit optimistic.
