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

To: Alighieri who wrote (705130)	3/21/2013 12:10:10 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574051

Talk about cherry-picking figures. But I'm interested in this phrase: "The slowdown has occurred in both government and overall health spending. From 2009 to 2011, total health spending grew at the lowest annual pace since the government started keeping records 52 years ago, a trend that seems to have continued last year. In the 2012 fiscal year, Medicare spending per beneficiary grew just 0.4 percent. The new Congressional Budget Office data said that overall Medicare outlays grew 3 percent in 2012, the slowest rate since 2000.” It is way, way premature (before the plan has even gone into effect) to start assuming there will be cost savings of any kind. We do not know yet what the stifling of innovation, which clearly will occur over time, will cost in terms of lost lives and increased cost to treat chronic illness. And we don't yet know what the cost of dumping millions of new uninsureds onto the government dole will be, nor the cost of those who were covered but lost their policies. In short, it is silly to claim Obamacare is saving money before large portions of it are even in effect. Meanwhile, private insurance policy costs are projected to increase massively in the next year. Don't get too excited just yet. There is some REALLY good news out of Arkansas, however, which is probably being the most assertive on Medicaid costs in the state. They are turning Medicaid over to private insurance companies and the likelihood is there WILL be cost savings there.

To: Alighieri who wrote (705130)	3/21/2013 2:23:08 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574051

Al, I think it's more important to focus on the trends than to dwell on the precision or lack thereof of the people selling it to the country. The trend of health care costs still points up and to the right. The CBO has to make assumptions that any reasonable person knows cannot be sustained. The author cites "structural changes" in how health care is delivered without naming one example. Well I can already name an example, and it's the sharp reduction in Medicare payments to doctors thanks to ObamaCare. A lot of doctors now won't see Medicare patients as a result, and some are resorting to seeing multiple patients at a time. This is not likely to be sustainable, as you can see many politicians seeking to reverse that provision of ObamaCare. Yet the defenders of ObamaCare, such as the author of that puff-piece article in Forbes, are already counting their chickens before they've hatched. Tenchusatsu