Senate GOP: CBO Is Terrible, Except When It Makes Us Look Good
Ditto The Bible and the Constitution of the United States of America.
Blunt is definitely NOT a democrat!
Krugman pointed out that over the next ten years, the US GPD should total about $230 TRILLION. $337 BILLION is .14% of 230 TRILLION. Thatâs fourteen hundreths of a percent. Thatâs what the a-holes in the GOP are so proud of; saving .14% over 10 years. They couldnât care less about the 24 million uninsured. Total raging a-holes.
I thought Roy Blunt was a R not a D.
Praise it with one hand and damn it with the other. Sometimes it has been wrong and sometimes right. Sometimes better than others. Thus is the life of economic models. It is generally not bad. Dems knock it too, when they do not get their way but they usually are not as keen on shutting them down and making the pursuit totally partisan.
From what I have read and seen, it seems like the premium decrease and the deficit reduction are more functions of making it cheaper for the young and healthy and more expensive for the old and sick. While cutting back government assistance and the like to reduce the deficit portion. If one does not care much about the downfalls, cutting the deficit is pretty easy.
It would be interesting to see how much cheaper for younger individuals. And if that would be enough to get them to buy them. Without a mandate to cause a penalty, it seems that the law lacks teeth to do much of anything. It will punish poor rural GOP voters pretty badly though.
I havenât reviewed the CBO numbers and methodology, but I could AND understand it, too. But I agree with the people who think it is wrong, but not in the way the GOPers think it is.
Prior to ACA, business were dropping health benefits, reducing coverage, having employees pay more, etc. Then the ACA added an employer mandate, so that firms that DID pay money to cover their employees were not making the government subsidize those who werenât. It wasnât perfect and should have been based on full-time equivalents instead of employees working over an hour threshold, but thatâs something that could have been fixed if the Rs let it, which they didnât and wouldât.
Without the ACA employer mandate, expect that process to accelerate VERY fast, far faster than the CBO could ever imagine, particularly since there are still tax credits available. So make the government subsidize people healthcare, not me, thinks a typical business owner or executive. I donât have to pay to administer a plan or take money from my employeesâ paychecks.
So fewer people will have coverage than CBO estimates, AND those who do will require more government subsidies so there goes the cost savings.
But thereâs another aspect of this that the CBO report (which I read, did you?) touches on but doesnât really go into much depth. People want healthcare and ACA made it possible for them to get it and pay some for it and for the government to pay some for it. Take that away, and a lot of money is NOT spent there, which means fewer healthcare jobs, more insecurity from people who either have coverage and may lose it, or lost it and need to spend their own money on healthcare. Healthcare is 18% of the economy, with those âgood paying jobsâ from engineers for medical devices to pharmacists. Take that away and BOOOOOMMM!! Instant recession.
So deficits will be higher, even more people will lose coverage, and you get a vicious cycle.
ACA, for all the bashing, set up a virtuous cycle which is why it didnât kill the economy, explode the deficit or create a government-run healthcare system. It did increase coverage and correctly spread the cost, particularly by increasing taxes on the wealthy to help more people. If they just increase taxes a little more, and hit the freeloaders a little harder with penalties for NOT making sure they had coverage, premiums would not have jumped an deductibles would have been lower. Instead, they will do the opposite and try to spin it as an improvement. Yuck.
Just to put that big savings into perspective, the cost of the F-35 Lightning II was, âBy 2014, ⌠â$163 billion over budget [and] seven years behind schedule.ââ Thatâs just the over budget part of the F-35 program, compared to cost savings projected by CBO of $337B over ten years, yes, that math works out to $33.7B a year, which is chump change to the US Budget.
Hey GOP, those savings arenât all that, ya know. Especially when that savings comes from uninsuring the poor and making seniors choose once again between healthcare or food.
I always thought that Turd Blossom was as reprehensible as they come, but he was just a worker with no skin in the game, like most of us. But McConnell, he gets people to vote for him, claims to represent the people and his state yet he is the most loathsome, noisome excuse of a human I have ever seen. How he can sleep or shave, I canât even fathom.
âIt shows we have a pathway to lower premiums, lower taxes, lower deficits, and the most significant entitlement reform in history,â McConnell said.
Let them talk about some tax cuts.
We can talk about the people killed for those cuts:
âaround 17,000 in 2018
âaround 29,000 in 2026
Thatâs more than all the deaths from terrorism in Western Europe over the past 45 years.
The 2026 number makes the GOP health insurance terrorists 10 times deadlier than the 9/11 terrorists.
Use those words: terrorists; and terrorism. Let the GOP have the fun of explaining why what they are doing isnât terrorism. Have you read the reports of people who will be losing affordable health insurance under the GOP plan? They are frightened. Some arenât sure how they will stay alive.
Shorter McConnell: âIâm dancing as fast as I can!â
Blunt used the same inaccurate talking points
Tsk, tsk, tsk, TPM. Letâs call it what it is: âBlunt used the same liesâ
That could work because, after all, the concept of terrorism was enough for us to dump trillions into wars against it, despite the fact that (excepting the casualties of those wars, but even with themâŚ), terrorism has killed far fewer Americans than cancer, or heart disease, or car accidents, or just about anything else. Iâm not saying terrorism doesnât need to be confronted, but a rational society would direct its efforts and material proportionately according to the greatest threats. What if weâd spent a sizable fraction of those trillions on cancer research or automobile engineering or traffic control research?
Of course, weâre not rational. If we didnât know that before, the election of trump showed us that.