Obamacare program costs $50,000 in taxpayer money for every American who gets health insurance, says bombshell budget report

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dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2927348/Obamacare-program-costs-50-000-American-gets-health-insurance-says-bombshell-budget-report.html

It will cost the federal government – taxpayers, that is – $50,000 for every person who gets health insurance under the Obamacare law, the Congressional Budget Office revealed on Monday.

The number comes from figures buried in a 15-page section of the nonpartisan organization’s new ten-year budget outlook.

The best-case scenario described by the CBO would result in ‘between 24 million and 27 million’ fewer Americans being uninsured in 2025, compared to the year before the Affordable Care Act took effect.

Pulling that off will cost Uncle Sam about $1.35 trillion – or $50,000 per head.

The numbers are daunting: It will take $1.993 trillion, a number that looks like $1,993,000,000,000, to provide insurance subsidies to poor and middle-class Americans, and to pay for a massive expansion of Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) costs.

Offsetting that massive outlay will be $643 billion in new taxes, penalties and fees related to the Obamacare law.

That revenue includes quickly escalating penalties – or ‘taxes,’ as the U.S. Supreme Court described them – on people who resist Washington’s command to buy medical insurance.

It also includes income from a controversial medical device tax, which some Republicans predict will be eliminated in the next two years.

If they’re right, Obamacare’s per-person cost would be even higher. >

CBO Still Refuses to Score Obamacare, Ignores 15 Tax Hikes in Healthcare Law

atr.org/cbo-still-refuses-score-obamacare-ignores-15-tax-hikes-healthcare-law

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this week released their annual Budget and Economic Outlook which sets the budget baselines and estimates for the whole year.

Buried in Appendix B of the report is CBO’s attempt to provide an updated score of Obamacare. But that’s not what they did. They only scored the “coverage provisions” of the law, ignoring some fifteen tax increases which are also a part of Obamacare and its cost to taxpayers.
 
I don’t see how this has anything to do with Catholicism or any other religion.
 
I’m surprised it’s that low. Usually they waste a lot more money.
 
I really don’t know much about economics and such so is this really that big of a deal? If someone more educated than I would explain then I would appreciate it.
 
Holly3278 said:
I really don’t know much about economics and such so is this really that big of a deal? If someone more educated than I would explain then I would appreciate it.
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It means the federal govt is spending more than $4000 per month for a product that costs less than $1000 per month.
 
I’m a retired federal employee so the fed govt pays half my health insurance premiums. My half plus their half is currently $800 per month for Individual BC/BS. (My husband is a Vietnam vet and gets VA care.)

Anyway, I’ve had Fed BCBS since I was 25 years old. I’m 51 now so my healthcare premiums have been $9,600 per year. Times 26 years, it comes to almost $250,000. I hope to live another 25 years.

$50,000 doesn’t seem so bad since I’ve paid $125,000 so far out of my own pocket for my individual health insurance.

If my logic here is wrong, I’m sure someone will let me know…🙂
 
Hodegetria said:
I’m a retired federal employee so the fed govt pays half my health insurance premiums. My half plus their half is currently $800 per month for Individual BC/BS. (My husband is a Vietnam vet and gets VA care.)

Anyway, I’ve had Fed BCBS since I was 25 years old. I’m 51 now so my healthcare premiums have been $9,600 per year. Times 26 years, it comes to almost $250,000. I hope to live another 25 years.

$50,000 doesn’t seem so bad since I’ve paid $125,000 so far out of my own pocket for my individual health insurance.

If my logic here is wrong, I’m sure someone will let me know…🙂
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$50,000 x 10 years = $500,000.00. That’s a lot more than the $96,000 you and the government are paying for your insurance over a ten year period.

I think perhaps the other things to think about are these:
  1. Why does every man, woman and child in America now have to pay (in one way or another) for coverage that costs a lot more than it should (or yours does) when the majority of the American public never favored the program to begin with and, indeed, opposes it now?
  2. Why, as Jonathan Gruber admits, was the public lied to about the costs and other consequences of the program?
  3. Why was it vitally important for this administration to require, for example, orders of nuns to provide contraceptive and abortifacient coverage for their workers and themselves, when the public demanded nothing of the kind?
  4. Why does Obamacare provide nothing at all to improve quality of care or to reduce the costs?
  5. Why is power to determine what treatments are provided to whom vested in an independent board with almost total power, all set up by a man who didn’t much think a hip replacement should be given to his own grandmother because she would outlive it?
 
Hodegetria said:
I’m a retired federal employee so the fed govt pays half my health insurance premiums. My half plus their half is currently $800 per month for Individual BC/BS. (My husband is a Vietnam vet and gets VA care.)

Anyway, I’ve had Fed BCBS since I was 25 years old. I’m 51 now so my healthcare premiums have been $9,600 per year. Times 26 years, it comes to almost $250,000. I hope to live another 25 years.

$50,000 doesn’t seem so bad since I’ve paid $125,000 so far out of my own pocket for my individual health insurance.

If my logic here is wrong, I’m sure someone will let me know…🙂
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The $50,000 is for ONE year. You are comparing premiums for 26 years to 1 year.

Over 26 years Obamacare is going to spend $1,300,000 for something that cost $250,000.

Does it seem like a good plan now?
 
Hodegetria said:
I’m a retired federal employee so the fed govt pays half my health insurance premiums. My half plus their half is currently $800 per month for Individual BC/BS. (My husband is a Vietnam vet and gets VA care.)

Anyway, I’ve had Fed BCBS since I was 25 years old. I’m 51 now so my healthcare premiums have been $9,600 per year. Times 26 years, it comes to almost $250,000. I hope to live another 25 years.

$50,000 doesn’t seem so bad since I’ve paid $125,000 so far out of my own pocket for my individual health insurance.

If my logic here is wrong, I’m sure someone will let me know…🙂
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I’m not 100% sure, but I think that $50,000 is the amount per year, not over a lifetime.

If I understand the article correctly, however, that figure is a bit misleading. I think it goes something like this:
  • The avowed purpose of Obamacare was to get more Americans insured.
  • Estimates are that 24-27 million people who weren’t insured before will be insured under Obamacare.
  • The total cost of Obamacare to the taxpayer is $1.3 billion, which, if you do the math (which I haven’t) it apparently comes out to an expenditure of $50,000 per newly insured person.
However, with the new bureaucracy, enforcement costs, wasting money having to do the website twice, lots of people who lost the insurance that they had and liked because it was too hard to meet Obamacare standards, the subsidies to people who had insurance before but can’t afford the increased costs now, etc., it’s not like they’re actually paying $50,000 per year per previously uninsured person. It’s just that they added so much other stuff in the bill that was unrelated to covering the uninsured that it costs a fortune.

The biggest problem (IMO) with Obamacare (aside from its basic premise) is that it requires coverage of too many things. In what universe is the pill a basic healthcare right? :mad: If the legal requirements had been more restrained, fewer people would have lost the health insurance they had and liked before (because their existing plans would have been found acceptable), fewer people would need subsidies, fewer people would be trying to avoid getting the insurance and requiring enforcement efforts, and so forth. When making minimum legal requirements for things to be covered, you don’t try to design the ideal health insurance coverage, you should just include the things that are most needed.

The state doesn’t require you to get deluxe car insurance to meet minimum legal requirements. The same principle should be used for health insurance.

–Jen
 
Holly3278 said:
I really don’t know much about economics and such so is this really that big of a deal? If someone more educated than I would explain then I would appreciate it.
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  1. Just about every single bill that the US Congress has passed in its history is more expensive than projected. :rolleyes: That’s why politicians have to run around using morality-based language like “we have an obligation to do this” or “this is a RIGHT” to make those who question such, ahem, “brilliant” ideas that always require tax dollars look stupid, shut their yaps and go along with the “in-crowd” in DC.
Big government apologists for any cause from “free” health care to so-called gay “marriage” use these lines routinely. :rolleyes:
  1. The problem with ObamaCare is that it is government interfering in the free market. Government always has an unfair advantage in the free market, because it isn’t checked by the free markets, which as Jason Lewis points out “used to be what people called the animal spirits”. See, if private company runs out of money, they go out of businesses. If the US government cannot pay all of its bills, it just prints more money.
  2. Printing money doesn’t really mean there is more money, and again as Lewis would say “all it means is that our money buys less”.
  3. Some medical providers will not accept Medicare or Medicaid because the government is so bad at reimbursing providers. Those who accept them just raise the price for all the other customers. That’s one reason why medical bills are so high.
  4. Another reason why medical bills are so high is because of something called tort law. The current format allows people to sue doctors for trivial things, and like any business, their legal costs are all built into the system with which you pay. So if doctors are getting sued all the time, it means that their cost of doing business goes up. When this happens, businesses often pass their costs onto the customer.
 
I wonder about all the “newly covered” people. There were wildly divergent estimates back before Obamacare was passed as to the number of uninsured. CBO has said some 30 million won’t be insured, despite Obamacare. I don’t think they know, in actuality.

One phenomenon we’re going to see prominently fairly soon is the mess Obamacare has created with small businesses. It was possible for small businesses to have group insurance for employees previously. Obamacare has mandated a lot of additional coverages, which has made it unaffordable for many. So, some employers simply quit providing it, and paid workers’ Obamacare premiums. But then the IRS decreed that such contributions would be subject to withholding and Medicare taxes, and taxable to the employees, which resulted in higher and unanticipated costs to employers and heavier tax burdens for employees.

In addition, some large employers have already raised the employee contributions to their group plans, and add to those contributions if employees’ health situations develop negative things like high blood pressure or blood sugar.

I think we’ll find that Obamacare is unaffordable for all kinds of people, much more expensive for many, and a benefit to a few. But that’s the objective, really. Obamacare is not a medical care plan or even an insurance plan. It’s an income redistribution plan.
 
The truly maddening part is that most of that $50000 isn’t going to patient care, it’s going instead into the insurance companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, the large IT companies who design deficient websites (Oregon, anyone?) and who will implement HIPAA, all of whom were at the table when the bill was being written, they were making sure they’re going to get paid first. All those administrators and executives have to get paid… it’s not a coincidence that many health care stocks have done very well since the passage of the ACA.

Used to be one paid a much smaller premium for catastrophic care only, the rest came out of pocket as necessary. So a healthy person might not spend much money in a calendar year. Today, that same healthy person has to pay through the nose for his premium up front whether he needs the care or not. In other words, part of the design of the ACA was to act as an asset-stripping mechanism to separate the young and healthy who didn’t need that much health care from their money.
 
zz912 said:
The $50,000 is for ONE year. You are comparing premiums for 26 years to 1 year.

Over 26 years Obamacare is going to spend $1,300,000 for something that cost $250,000.

Does it seem like a good plan now?
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Can’t be over one year. Has to be life-time.

From the CBO report:

*CBO and JCT currently estimate that the ACA’s coverage provisions will result in net costs to the federal government of $76 billion in 2015 and $1,350 billion over the 2016–2025 period. *
 
RidgeRunner’s comment just above points to other trends I’ve been observing over the last few years due to the ACA’s effects:
  • the increase in part-time workers as opposed to full-time. many lower paid workers have been pushed below the 30 hour threshold, with the result being that they often have to take a second part-time job to make ends meet. This is endemic in retail and service industries.
  • the increase in the use of contractors instead of employees to carry out full-time jobs, particularly in smaller companies but happening frequently at larger ones too. I’ve seen this all over the telecom and IT industries, and I don’t doubt that other industries are making use of them. With contractors, all of the health care costs are shoved onto the contractor and/or the company that hires him out.
  • small companies purposely staying below 50 employees in order to escape some of the mandates that companies with 50 or more employees are subjected to. Sometimes this shows up as contractors, other times the company will be broken into smaller pieces.
  • with self-employed persons, there is a steep income cliff right at the income thresholds of eligibility for ACA subsidies. This cliff removes a lot of incentive to make more money unless one is guaranteed to make a lot more money, because it will just be lost once the subsidy is lost.
  • it has to be mentioned that it is extraordinarily anti-competitive against small businesses, the ACA protects the largest employers from competition by smaller companies because the larger companies can more easily absorb compliance costs than small companies. This applies for all regulations, by the way, but the effect of the ACA in this area are really pernicious.
  • the application process for getting coverage under the subsidies is extraordinarily invasive of one’s privacy on a scale not seen before. This is the government’s heavy handed means of getting information on all citizens, the long term effects of which we have yet to see in this case, but past history of government surveillance doesn’t bode well.
 
Zzyzx_Road said:
  • it has to be mentioned that it is extraordinarily anti-competitive against small businesses, the ACA protects the largest employers from competition by smaller companies because the larger companies can more easily absorb compliance costs than small companies. This applies for all regulations, by the way, but the effect of the ACA in this area are really pernicious.
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Well said.

Regulation in about any stripe isn’t about consumer protection, but protecting the Big Dogs from competition.
 
zz912 said:
The $50,000 is for ONE year. You are comparing premiums for 26 years to 1 year.

Over 26 years Obamacare is going to spend $1,300,000 for something that cost $250,000.

Does it seem like a good plan now?
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I know several posters pointed this out, but I saw nothing in the OP that said the Obamacare $50,000 was for ONE year:

From the OP: **The number comes from figures buried in a 15-page section of the nonpartisan organization’s new ten-year budget outlook. **

I was just presenting my figures in comparison, but if you like, my personal 10-year out of pocket cost is $48,000. With my govt share, $96,000. Almost twice as much as Obamacare.
 
Al_Moritz said:
Can’t be over one year. Has to be life-time.

From the CBO report:

*CBO and JCT currently estimate that the ACA’s coverage provisions will result in net costs to the federal government of $76 billion in 2015 and $1,350 billion over the 2016–2025 period. *
Click to expand...
**From the OP: The number comes from figures buried in a 15-page section of the nonpartisan organization’s new ten-year budget outlook. **

If we can trust the Daily Mail, (heh, seems like more than a few of their stories involve a “bombshell” report) it looks like a 10-year projection.
 
Zzyzx_Road said:
The truly maddening part is that most of that $50000 isn’t going to patient care, it’s going instead into the insurance companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, the large IT companies who design deficient websites (Oregon, anyone?) and who will implement HIPAA, all of whom were at the table when the bill was being written, they were making sure they’re going to get paid first. All those administrators and executives have to get paid… it’s not a coincidence that many health care stocks have done very well since the passage of the ACA.

Used to be one paid a much smaller premium for catastrophic care only, the rest came out of pocket as necessary. So a healthy person might not spend much money in a calendar year. Today, that same healthy person has to pay through the nose for his premium up front whether he needs the care or not. In other words, part of the design of the ACA was to act as an asset-stripping mechanism to separate the young and healthy who didn’t need that much health care from their money.
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I have worked in a hospital (lab tech) for over 30 years.

I sincerely hope that we DO get some of that money!

Our State government (Illinois) owes our hospital many millions of dollars in Medicaid payments. We have projects and equipment that are on hold, as well as the hiring of more staff (mainly nursing) because we don’t have the money that we are owed. Many of the projects and equipment that we have obtained have been paid for with the money that we don’t yet have from our State government because we simply couldn’t wait any longer to do those projects and get that equipment!

We have come to accept that we are providing lab testing FOR FREE for the people who go to our system of "Low Income Clinics), as well as for the uninsured people and immigrants who come through our ER. The other hospitals in our city do not accept Medicaid patients.

Just last week, I did an RPR test on one of these patients, and it was positive. Three days later, we received another RPR test on that same patient–people don’t get “cured” from syphilis in 3 days! These kinds of wasteful practices continue to happen every day and result in many millions of dollars of waste, not to mention the tech time.

Of course, I’m sure that many of you will figure out that in order to make up for all the “free” testing that we do, we end up charging all the “insured” people (including ACA-insured) exorbitant prices for our tests. A throat culture, which takes up one petri plate (about 1 cent) and about 2 minutes of our tech time, will cost “Big Insurance” over $200.00. It’s so ridiculous, but we have to do something to re-coup our losses. (It’s the same thing for nursing charges, all the other ancillary health departments, etc.–all the charges are jacked up to make up for the “free” work that we have to give out).

Federal government, show us the money! Please!
 
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