Joe Barton on CMS Actuary’s Report

People can usually feel a storm coming and that’s why they turned against ObamaCare last summer. Now the storm is here.’

WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, today made the following statement on the release of a report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service’s Office of the Actuary saying that the new ObamaCare law will not reduce costs.

“What’s extraordinary about the report is that the Democrats’ health care promises are evaporating so quickly,” Barton said. “Now Americans are finding that they’re stuck with some of the worst of the health care reform’s many unhappy consequences – higher costs instead of lower, and coverage that you’re going to lose no matter how much you like it. People can usually feel a storm coming and that’s why they turned against ObamaCare last summer. Now the storm is here.”

The new health care law:

• Cuts $575.1 from Medicare between now and September 30, 2019.
• ObamaCare spends more than $828 billion for health care coverage. (CMS didn’t analyze all the tax increases, such as HSAs, FSAs, increasing the AGI threshold, etc.)
• Imposes $87 billion in additional punitive taxes on employers over the 2014-2019 period alone.
• Imposes more than $33 billion in additional punitive taxes on uninsured individuals over the 2015-2019 period alone.
• Leaves 23 million individuals without health insurance coverage in 2019.
• Provides coverage for 34 million people in 2019, of which 18 million will be forced into Medicaid, known for its access problems and substandard payments to providers.
• Increases health care spending to 21 percent of GDP by 2019.
• Uninsured and those employers who don’t offer coverage will pay $120 billion in taxes.
• Causes half of seniors to lose their Medicare Advantage plans.
• Creates another trust fund that is destined for insolvency. Within the next 15 years, the new trust fund for the CLASS program will start to pay out more in benefits than it collects in premiums, causing yet another federal program to add billions of dollars to our national debt.