Posted on 03/09/2015 5:52:43 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) —The Affordable Care Act's price tag continues to fall.
The president's landmark health reform law will cost $506 billion for the coming five fiscal years, according to updated projections from the Congressional Budget Office, released Monday. That's 29% less than the agency's projection back in March 2010.
Among the reasons for the decline:
-- The Supreme Court's 2012 ruling that allowed states to decide whether to expand Medicaid.
-- The continued slow growth of health care spending.
-- Enrollment in Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges has ramped up more slowly than anticipated.
In its latest projection, CBO also revised its estimates for where people are getting insurance.
It now expects only 7 million people to lose job-based coverage by 2025, down from 9 million. That's because new data shows that fewer people had work-based plans than the CBO thought.
Conversely, Medicaid enrollment before the expansion was higher than originally thought. So CBO only expects 14 million more folks to enroll by 2025, rather than 16 million.
Fewer Americans lacked coverage than originally projected, CBO said.
Only 22 million will enroll in the Affordable Care Act individual exchanges, while 25 million will remain uninsured by 2025, according to the new projections. That's 2 million less in each category. As a result, the feds will spend 20% less on subsidizing low- and moderate-income Americans on the exchanges. And it will collect 6.4% less in penalties from the uninsured.
Health care spending, however, won't stay muted for much longer, the agency said. Private health insurance spending per enrollee grew an average of 1.8% between 2006 and 2013. But it's expected to ramp up to 5.6%, on average, between 2016 and 2025.
Overall, the Affordable Care Act will cost the federal government $1.2 trillion between 2016 and 2025, 11% less than the CBO projected in January.
This revision in Affordable Care Act costs contributed to the CBO lowering its projected federal deficit estimate by $431 billion.
I think somebody been hittin’ da happy smoke. It has already COST us more “than thought”. Morons are everywhere!
... The cost of the Affordable Care Act will be calculated at the "FREE" mark by the time Obama leaves office ..... (If indeed he does). That way he will have accomplished another amazing miraculous feat to impress the disciples of the One.
WISHN is right.
BULLSH**. I talked to an economist friend just this week and he said it will likely cost triple the amount specified when all is said and done, and factoring in all the illegal care.
I believe the big savings (never mentioned) from Obamacare will be via the Death Panels.
Every year sliced off the lifespan is HUGE for SocSec and Medicare.
When the millennials get testy about granny’s early demise, President Warren will send them some Groupons for student loan relief.
If this is true, it is likely due to people simply forgoing many medical services because of the sky high deductibles.
“Tami is also a graduate of Columbia College”
That’s all you need to know.....that and the fact that every statement she claimed in her story is verifiably false
We are so blessed.
The effects on the field of medicine have been immense, and negative. That’s an admittedly passionate assessment, but is based on a foundation of dispassionate fact. Medicine is now about ‘treating the herd’, and is becoming increasing devoid of caring about the individual patient. If you like being thought of as part of a statistical ‘cohort’, then this approach is for you. If you actually think of yourself as an individual, and your life as having individual value, then you are not going to be happy with this system if it stays in place. It’s amazing to me how, pushed in part by delusional and frankly ignorant academics, we continue to copy failed European experiments. Very sad.
Good news: it’s the first government rule, regulation, program, or department - IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF PLANET EARTH - that’s gonna cost less than estimated.
“Catastrophic coverage with low premiums and high deductibles was deemed “inferior” by Obola and has been replaced by high premium/higher deductible insurance. “
I’d love to have mine back.
Does this include Medicaid enrollees? Because if it does, these numbers are horsesh**.
To who? The poor.
These guys throw hundred billion dollar figures around like lunch money, and I’m sure no equation has ever been cyphered to come up with their figures. I’m also just as sure we will never know the real cost.
The War on Poverty has cost this Country about $11,000,000,000,000. The same percentage of the Population still lives in Poverty as they did back in the 1960’s.
The number if “uninsured”, according to this Report will be 25,000,000 under Obamacare. When all this Socialized Medicine talk started, the proponents tossed around numbers of Uninsured from 30,000,000 to 40,000,000.
This same report now says that the number of Uninsured that the Government claimed existed was actually much less.
My head hurts, but not as much as my Wallet.
Alexis de Toqueville toured America in 1831. In his subsequent book, Democracy in America, he observed that one in seven families refused to take advantage of the opportunities that were so widespread. They chose to live in poverty in the midst of ample opportunity.
And so, here we are today, and roughly what proportion of American families habitually live on the dole? About one in seven.
All we have done is subsidize those who refuse to help themselves. We are enabling poverty, not solving it.
My Dear Late Mother always said, “you help People who CAN’T help themselves, not People who WON’T help themselves”.
It’s truer today than when she first said it to me over 50 Years ago. Back then, people were embarrassed to be on the Dole. Now it’s a lifestyle.
Don't forget the unforseen hidden consequences. As soon as the present administration was sworn in research institutions began to close. and CROs (Contract Research Organizations) started building campuses in China. No small Pharma company (and very few large ones) will spend the necessary half billion dollars to develop a compound that even though it is proven effective and safe, government health bureaucrats can just decide not to include the new drug in their payment schedules.
I think more people will suffer because of research that is not done because of this mess
I’m semi involved in the space. Few new what we have thought of as drugs will be developed anymore, but the reason is not the freeking feds. Personalized medicine is here, the “vaccines for prostate cancer, melanoma” are examples. The mental health space has had a big recent change. Bi-polar/ schizophrenia was recently found to be a cluster of syndromes involving (so far) 3000 genes broken into 45 different categories and 9 different syndromes. Figuring out what the actual issue is and repairing it instead of papering over with a band-aide is nearly here. Think of this, this year the first human heart will be printed by what in effect is a system no different then the 3d printers you can buy for home use. As soon as the figure out how to grow/print nerve fibers limbs could be printed and installed. Some wacko MD claims he will be able to do a body transplant this year.
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