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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (587443)	9/25/2010 1:01:44 PM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576909

They're estimates are politically influenced based on assumptions that change during the writing of the bill and have a solid record of being wildly short of the true cost. Yeah, i have heard that tale before...the trouble is you used the word "unfunded". The new plan was written by the same industry and will be the same but worse in terms of size and deficit. The Congressional Budget Office has already adjusted the cost for ObamaCare since it passed, adding another $115 billion to the taxpayer’s tab. Far from being "unfunded" eh? The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has adjusted upwards its cost prediction since the bill took effect from 6.1% per year to 6.3%. By 2019, U.S. spending on health care will reach $4.6 trillion. So we've added 30M new patients, some of which end up on medicaid, and the cost is up .2%? Unfunded you said. Al

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (587443)	9/25/2010 1:03:17 PM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576909

Congress has a long history of dramatically underestimating Medicare costs. "At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion," wrote Steven Hayward and Erik Peterson in a 1993 Reason article. "The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was supposedly a 'conservative' estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion." This fiscal year, a recent Cato Institute report notes, Medicare is expected to cost $244 billion ($172 billion in 1990 dollars). Not only are the real costs of Medicare constantly rising; the ratio between the workers who pay for the program and the retirees who benefit from it is falling. "The number of elderly will soar 116 percent by 2040," says the Cato study, "while the number of workers supporting them will grow just 22 percent." Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters estimate that the long-term imbalance between Medicare costs and revenues under existing law is something like $36 trillion, more than five times the current national debt. Given a problem of this magnitude, the gestures toward reform in the Medicare bill—limited medical savings accounts, higher premiums for beneficiaries making more than $80,000 a year, and a six-city experiment with private competition that's supposed to begin in 2010—are pretty pathetic. reason.com

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (587443)	9/28/2010 12:48:49 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1576909

They're estimates are politically influenced based on assumptions that change during the writing of the bill and have a solid record of being wildly short of the true cost. Very true. Also even if somehow those estimates where accurate, they would only "decrease the deficit, by a relatively small amount, and do so, not because spending is going down, but because they increase revenue. Using up ways to increase revenue, without sizably decreasing the deficit, is fiscally irresponsible.