Comments Subscribe to Personal Liberty Digest™ News Feed Subscribe to Personal Liberty Digest™ 

Analysis finds healthcare overhaul will increase spending

August 2, 2011 by  

A recent report finds that healthcare reform may increase costs.Despite promises that the healthcare overhaul will cut health spending, recent analysis shows that it may in fact increase healthcare costs.

The Washington Times reports that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that over the next 10 years with President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, health spending will grow 5.8 percent annually. However, if the Act had not passed, annual spending for healthcare would increase 5.7 percent, according to the centers.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said that the forecast shows that the healthcare overhaul was an unwise piece of legislation.

“Simply put, this report states the obvious, that Americans have known for more than a year — the $2.6 trillion law only makes the fundamental problem of skyrocketing healthcare costs worse,” he said.

Officials with the centers said that part of the reason for increased costs is that the percentage of the population that will be insured will increase.

Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Liberty News, Other News
Personal Liberty News Desk

Facebook Conversations

Join the Discussion:
View Comments to “Analysis finds healthcare overhaul will increase spending”

Comment Policy: We encourage an open discussion with a wide range of viewpoints, even extreme ones, but we will not tolerate racism, profanity or slanderous comments toward the author(s) or comment participants. Make your case passionately, but civilly. Please don't stoop to name calling. We use filters for spam protection. If your comment does not appear, it is likely because it violates the above policy or contains links or language typical of spam. We reserve the right to remove comments at our discretion.

Is there news related to personal liberty happening in your area? Contact us at newstips@personalliberty.com

  • Altaica

    I certainly don’t like the fact that we are forced to purchase medical insurance or pay a penalty. If the cost of medical care hadn’t gotten so ridiculous we wouldn’t need insurance in the first place for the common things. Expensive meds, big pharma paying docs to prescribe their stuff, Insurance rates skyrocketing.

    And then there is the threat of taking away alternate medicine. I would much prefer to use natural remedies for whatever I can and learn how to balance my diet to support my health.

    One of the big problems with our medical health is from diet, but some of that is simply from not being educated properly. Nutritionists cost a lot of money, but I feel the information of what is proper in a diet should be free. I’ve been doing a lot of research, one of my plans is to get my herbalist license in the future, and it’s pretty hard for the average person to find all the information they need.

    Big companies tout things like “High Fructose Corn Syrup is fine for you in moderation.” How about it’s pretty bad for you, look up the Princeton study on it. And as for moderation, how can you have it in moderation when they put it in everything. There are so many chemicals in our food and our drinking water that our bodies are getting overloaded. I don’t really like the genetically modified foods deal either and I think they should be required to label it. My corn should not have genes implanted into from a fish!

    A lot of foods touted as healthy are turning up to be worse for you because of all the artificial chemicals or processed materials that strip the food of it’s healthy properties.

    Has anyone else noticed that not only has Diabetes been on the rise but also an major increase in food allergies, most note-ably corn?

    To me health care reform should mean educating the people, not going to the doctor for every tiny thing, and doing something to stop the exorbitant cost of doctor’s visits and prescriptions. Big Pharma and government and most doctors aren’t going to do this. They want their money and don’t care about us.

  • http://www.lp.org Jerome Bigge

    Consider this: The US spends about 50% more on health care than do the rest of the developed world nations. They control their health care costs. We do not. We exclude tens of millions of people from anything but emergency care. They do not. Our problem is simple enough. We have allowed the US medical industry to charge whatever it wants and we have to pay for it. The rest of the developed world took the smarter path. We could follow their example or we could try true free market medicine as Libertarians have been advocating for decades. Take away the monopoly over medicine that doctors enjoy. Repeal prescription laws. Drug laws in general. Allow anyone who has medical knowledge to apply that knowledge to the limits of their knowledge. For most things you really don’t need an MD. You don’t need yearly or twice yearly checkups. People know when they are sick. You don’t need a doctor to tell you that. Back before prescription laws existed, people went to their neighborhood drug store and told the druggist their problems. The druggist, having been filling prescriptions for years, knew what cured what. He could give you the same medicine as a doctor would prescribe for you. But by going to the druggist instead of the doctor, you saved the cost of an office fee. This is the way things were done before the passage of prescription laws. Which were passed by the Roosevelt administration in 1938 at the request of the AMA (union for doctors).
    The reason these laws were passed was to “improve” the income of doctors. Not to protect the public. This is one of the truths that Libertarians know. And why Libertarians have better “answers” to our problems than do either Democrats or Republicians or Tea Partiers.

    • Ellen

      Jerome, I agree with you. If we went with a free market for medical care and enabled pharmacists to give us some drugs (ie: antibiotics, birth control) without a prescription, we could cut expenses. Other countries that have socialized medicine require people to pay premiums and they still must pay 20% of their medical costs. These programs work much like Medicare. The downside to their cost controlling is that they make it very difficult to get anything but necessary or emergency care. If you have a problem that is not life-threatening, you will wait years to get it resolved. Americans are not used to that kind of care. We have been lead to believe the opposite is true. We’ve been told to seek care immediately for every sniffle. And, we’re paying for that stupidity now. Further, we provide free medical care to immigrants. In France, you begin paying taxes immediately but you can not sign up for socialized medicine for 5 years. Countries with socialized medicine don’t use prescription drugs like we do. We’re just 5% of the world’s population yet we use more prescription drugs than the rest of the world combined. We need to go back to the mindset that we are responsible for taking care of ourselves and only seek medical care if truly needed. Going for an annual physical doesn’t prevent anything and drugs are not the answer to every health problem.

      • eddie47d

        More Pharmaceuticals are used in this country bcause those companies make millions off these products. They also advertise their products as must have drugs whether it’s good for you or not. The government doesn’t tell them to make a product they only approve the product. Once again the private industry made suckers out of all of us. The biggest consumer complaint is high drug costs and why can’t the government approve these drugs faster. Big Pharma is a cash cow and yes indeed their CEOs are getting mighty rich.

      • Song

        I agree, Big Pharma is a “cash cow” and unfortunately millions of Americans buy into their claims and promises. I think as a whole, Americans have just become very lazy and now, we (collectively)are paying for it. Personally, I am very skeptical of big pharma and all of their claims and as I get older I become increasingly skeptical of doctors in general.

      • Ellen

        Song, I agree that Americans have become lazy and we are all paying the price. I learned the truth about our medical system when my sister had cancer. We have experts who really aren’t experts, drugs that really don’t cure and actually may do more harm, and the old fall-back of ‘standard medical practice.’ Many people are simply too busy to eat well and exercise and they want to believe that some drug will fix all the problems caused by their poor lifestyle choices. No such drug exists, but Big Pharm certainly tries to pretend it does.

    • Zdravko-K

      What you advocate makes perfect sense, however, without Tort Reform, it is very unlikely that a pharmacist would put him/herself in such a position of liability. It is bad enough that physicians practice “defensive medicine.”

  • GregS

    This is all the more reason for getting Obummer out of office in 2012, regardless of who runs against him. If he wins re-election, all chances of repealing ObummerCare will be lost, because he will have complete veto power to stop any repeal bills that come out of Congress, unless BOTH houses have veto-proof majorities (highly unlikely). Then, in 2014 ObummerCare will become a full-blown entitlement, when it fully takes effect. This country cannot take another entitlement!

    In 2012, we ALL (i.e. those of us who are against ObummerCare) must forget our petty differences and UNITE to get Obummer out of office. Obummer’s orcs and trolls will be out in full force to pick up supporters, and to divide-and-conquer his opponents. It will probably be a close race in the 2012 general election, so any opponent of Obummer who does not vote in that race (because he/she doesn’t like either candidate), or who votes for a third-party candidate who has no chance of winning, will actually be voting for Obummer. PLEASE, fellow ObummerCare opponents, don’t let this happen!

    The time to choose the best person to oppose Obummer will be during the primary elections. If your favorite candidate doesn’t win in the primary, get over it and move on! The final goal should be to get Obummer out of office, regardless of who wins in the primary. That’s all that should matter if you don’t want ObummerCare to become a permanent reality.

  • TIME

    WOW ~~~~~~~~ What a TOTAL shocker ~~~~~~~~ Not; really this is just what many of us here said would happen.
    BUT NOoooooooooo the Quais Liberals said we were telling lies about Barry Soetoro with his band of little of criminals in congress.

    Well Guess what? We who took the time to look at this bills pure absurity’s let alone utter misstruths being touted by not only the LAME STREAM MEDIA, but the Quasi Liberals who know nothing at all as everything they say is like a PARROT in a cage repeating word for word what their MASTERS tell them to say.
    Then we have our stellar Political class.

    SO What could possibly go wrong?

  • Robert A Hirschmann

    pay for it??? What a shock!

  • Robert A Hirschmann

    Gee! What a surprise. And all this time I thought that Obamacare meant free medical treatment for everybody. You mean that we will have to p

  • ron

    You should consider the source of this information. find a source that does not have a dog in this hunt and not one that is loyal to either party as this one surely is.

  • s c

    This isn’t surprising news, people. It was obvious from the start that this administration will say and do ANYTHING to straddle America with the worst healthcare on the face of the planet.
    The only polite way to describe this puke legislation is to call it ‘wealth redistribution’ on crack and lsd [aka THEFT]. We don’t need it, we can’t afford it, and if Bummer had the integrity it takes to tell the American people THE TRUTH, he’d tell us that we were exactly right in wishing that we could shove it right back up its “source.”

    • eddie47d

      SC; Some of you need to remember that healthcare costs rose 56% without a government plan being initiated. Most private providers raised their costs a few years before the Affordable Healthcare Plan was a twinkle in the governments eye. These private insurers also raised their premiums once or twice in anticipation of this new plan. Since their is little difference in the cost of the “old way” vs the “new way” and millions more are covered then all this bellyaching about getting gouged by the government isn’t being realistic.I’ve been “shocked” by the rapid rise in private healthcare and private pharmaceuticals so why don’t you take that to the bank instead of blowing more hot air. Not wanting more government in our lives is understandable and that is what this site is all about. The real problem is who is really allowing medical care to be so costly?Check out the bank accounts of CEOs of private insurers,now that would be a shocker.

      • Ellen

        Eddie, Costs have been steadily rising for years because we over-use our healthcare system and because we let it be abused by requiring free healthcare to uninsured non-Americans. Insurance is a simple concept: the insurer must collect more in premiums than it pays in claims. As claims have been increasing, premiums have been increasing. The industry profit is about 2 to 5%, so insurers are not the problem. We’ve been brainwashed into believing our doctors have the answers to everything and that we need a physical each year. Much of ‘preventative’ medicine is a fallicy and doctors can’t find serious diseases such as cancer in an annual physical. Add to this that our doctors have been indoctrinated into the belief that there is a drug to cure everything, when most drugs mask underlying problems and cause bigger issues (statins, acid reflux drugs, etc). Now we’re going to provide free preventative care for 30 million people (who already had free care if they had an illness/injury) and they will use that free care because ‘somebody owes them’ and increase claims. Remember that increased claims = increased premiums. So, all the responsible people who’ve been paying to insure themselves, and are struggling to do that, will now get a premium increase so they can pay for 30 million more people. We already provide housing, food, utilities and some medical care for these people so obvioulsy we owe them free preventative medical care, too.

      • Emoke

        Government has had their finger in the healthcare industry long before Obama care came into being. Understandably the insurance industry is in the business of making money not of taking care of your health. The shame of it is that with legislation passed to require the insurance companies to operate in certain ways, in the interest of spreading the risk, it always drove the cost of insurance up. Being a country based on capitalism, they could not legislate their profit away. The insurance industry and the government have been in bed together for a long time leaving the average citizen outside waiting to be fleeced.

        Try and find a major medical plan that costs substantially less than an HMO. They don’t exist. They have been legislated out of being. Laws mandate that insurance companies cover this that and the other, whether or not the consumer cares to pay for that coverage. There is a prevailing attitude that individuals will not take care of themselves properly. The cost of everything needs to go through insurance. Years ago individuals could afford to pay for their own medical care out of pocket but with the collusion between the government and insurance companies that is becoming increasingly difficult except in cases that are not covered by insurance such as some plastic surgery and some eye surgeries. It is amazing how many people could afford the 15k per eye that corrective eye surgery was costing years ago and how many boob jobs are still being done.

        There is tension between the doctors and the insurance companies since they both feel they should be able to make the most money. Then with the government stepping in to stir the pot it just makes the situation worse. Understand that self interest is not a bad thing, it is what drives an individual or company to provide a service. It is only when an arbiter steps in and refocuses them away from the service they are providing that things go to pot.

        I fully support the federal government receding to its constitutional duties only and removing itself from all the other areas it has reached into. Only I suspect it will not do any of that receding voluntarily.

      • Ellen

        The government involvement is true. Fortunately, it is state govt and they tend to be more reasonable in most places. This is why New York has the highest medical insurance costs and many states have costs that are only half as much. It all depends on the requirements set by each state’s insurance commission.

      • Bob G

        Very well said Ellen. Eddie hasn’t got a clue. I pay for my healthcare plus copayments. My friend who has a small construction business cannot afford healthcare insurance so he and his family simply go to emergency for FREE. Or rather I pay for it so his medical really isn’t free at all.

      • s c

        Comrade e, check out the bank accounts and publish the total wealth of the sunny beaches in Congress. Those are the muthas who find ways to jack up healthcare costs, blame the insurance companies and then expect the American people to pay for those skyrocketing costs.
        Get a clue. You’re so used to being lied by your political gods that you’re addicted to b s.
        Progressive politics and psychoses are opposite sides of the same damned coin, comrade. Even some of your favorite media whores are seeing that your political gods are more interested in being worshiped than they are in living up to their responsibilities as representatives of the people.

blog comments powered by Disqus

All Categories

Bottom