Speaker Pelosi famously said that Congress would have to pass the health care legislation for the American people to know what is really in it. Boy was she right. Before the bill became law, we could only speculate on how much more health care would cost as a result of the law and how much it would damage private insurance and alter our health care delivery system. Now, we are getting more solid evidence and estimates on just how bad the law is.
As Julie pointed out yesterday, it’s been 100 days since the health care bill became law and Senators Coburn and Barrasso released a report highlighting what we’ve learned about the laws’ effects on the health care system. Julie highlighted some of the key findings, but I wanted to pull out a little additional important information from the report.
Here’s a little information on the law’s expected costs:
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), premiums for millions of American families in 2016 will be 10-13 percent higher than they otherwise would be. 2 This represents a $2100 increase per family, compared with the status quo….
This is not the only bad news. According to the same memo, the new health care law bends the cost curve upward and increases national health spending. In other words, health care will cost more because of this new law.
…according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) only about seven percent of American households will be eligible to receive the subsidies.19 This means that nine in 10 households will receive no subsidy or tax benefit for health insurance under the new law, and will continue to experience premium costs rising at or above their current rate of increase.
To make matters even worse, one in four Americans with the subsidy will still see their taxes increase, even after taking the subsidy into account.20 To accomplish -savings? for seven percent of Americans, the new law redistributes nearly $800 billion generated from increasing taxes and cutting Medicare for millions of other Americans.21
And a bit on the future (or lack thereof) of private insurance:
Contrary to the promise that Americans who like their current health plan can keep it, the Administration published a regulation regarding -grandfathered health plans? – plans that are exempt from the changes under the law.5 According to the published regulation, as many as seven out of every 10 businesses across the country will lose their -grandfathered health plan.
This means that about half of the more than 150 million Americans enrolled in employer plans will lose their current plan and either remain without employer coverage, or see the cost of that employer-provided coverage increase due to government mandates and regulation.
No wonder a growing number of Americans support the law’s repeal. Pelosi was right, the law did have to go into affect before Americans could full understand just how awful it truly is.