subject: Health Reform Cost: Does Anyone Really Know? [print this page] The new Obama health plan has been met with a great deal of opposition, mostly due to the fact that no one is certain what the true cost will be for the general public. While the United States health care system was in need of an overhaul, most agree this plan is simply not the best way to proceed.
To help you determine if anyone really knows the true cost of the Obama health care plan, let's begin by considering a few numbers. In March, the Congressional Budget Office released figures that for the next ten years, the cost of the plan would be about $950 billion. The office also stated that since the plan would only raise some revenues and lower costs, it would actually lower the federal deficit by as much as $138 billion. This then means that the new plan would actually work to better the financial condition of the country.
If you are thinking that this does not seem quite right, you are not alone. If you were to take away all of the rhetoric and sort through all of the budget "games", you would get a very different view of how much the plan truly costs. In fact, this number would come out to actually raising the federal deficit by more than $560 billion.
So, what is the reason for this very drastic difference? Well, universal health care does not come cheap, and in order to present it in the best possible light, congress had to add a bunch of "extras" to the bill, as well as complete the package with a bunch of "gimmicks". One of the most notable gimmicks is that the plan actually is taking from one area, to pay another. This is done by taking more than $50 from higher Social Security taxes to offset the cost of health care.
Another somewhat shocking reality is that the new health care plan says it will cut more than $460 billion from Medicare spending and use that money to finance subsidies for insurance. This sounds good, but Medicare is already in trouble and these reforms would only hurt the program for the long term.
The bottom line? This type of health care reform will do more to harm the health of the country than help it. By taking from one place to give to another, services of all kinds will inevitably suffer a great deal. In fact, the true numbers indicate that when all figures are tallied and all the games are stopped, the true cost of the Obama health plan could double the nation's debt to more than $20 trillion dollars within the next decade.
