Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Unemployment shifts a shitload of people from those paying into the PPACA to those receiving subsidies from it. This is a loss of anticipated funding. Additionally, the 3.8% tax on unearned income is not going to deliver what's expected. The flaws in the assumptions about revenue available to fund HCR are not undone by your repeating, "It's funded by Medicare cuts!" You know that's only a fraction of the funding, and you know damn well I'm right when I say money is fungible, and the cost of this program in light of the lack of much of what was anticipated to be available is going to have to be made up for with borrowing elsewhere.
|
Christian Science Monitor on HCR:
Quote:
So where’s the cash to pay for this coming from? Remember, CBO says this bill will actually cut the deficit over 10 years. That means it has to raise a little more money than it will spend.
The answer is that the money will be provided by new taxes, fees on industries involved in health care, and cuts in projected spending growth for existing government health efforts, primarily Medicare.
Here are specifics on some of the biggest money raisers:
Higher Medicare taxes on rich people
If you are an individual making more than $200,000 a year, or a married couple making more than $250,000 a year, get ready to pay more for your Medicare if health care reform passes.
First of all, your Medicare Part A (that’s hospital insurance) tax rate would be increased by 0.9 percent, to 2.35 percent. Second, the bill creates an entirely new tax of 3.8 percent on unearned income (dividends, interest, stuff like that) for people in those same income brackets.
The good news is that this would not take effect until Jan. 1, 2013. And it is a big money raiser, truth be told. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates this would bring in $210 billion between 2013 and 2019.
New tax on expensive health insurance
They used to call this the “Cadillac tax,” but it’s been pared back enough so it might better be called the “Chevy with leather and A/C” tax.
The health care bill would impose an excise tax on insurers of employer-sponsored health plans that cost more than $10,200 annually for individual coverage, or $27,500 annually for family coverage. The tax in question would be 40 percent of the cost of the plan that exceeds those dollar thresholds.
This tax would not kick in until 2018. The JCT figures it would bring in around $32 billion in its first two years.
Fees on health care industries
The Obama administration figures it is only fair to slap some fees on health care industries, since they’d be getting lots of new customers if health care reform passes. So after negotiations with some big sectors, the White House struck a number of deals.
* Drug manufacturers would pay the US a total of $16 billion between 2011 and 2019.
* Health insurers would pay $47 billion over the same period.
* Medical device manufacturers would pay a 2.9 percent excise tax on the sale of any of their wares, beginning Jan. 1, 2013.
The tanning tax
OK, it’s not a big money raiser, but we could not resist mentioning that health care reform would establish a tax of 10 percent on indoor tanning services. (Outdoor tanning services remain untaxed, of course.) This would raise $2.7 billion between 2010 and 2019.
Medicare cuts
Government payments to Medicare Advantage – plans run by private insurers that are an alternative to traditional Medicare – would be reduced by $132 billion over 10 years under the health care reform bill. (Those plans now get around 14 percent more per person than traditional Medicare does.)
Medicare payments for home health care would also be reduced by $40 billion over 10 years. And cuts in certain payments to hospitals would raise another $22 billion by 2019.
|
Like I said, I really don't have time to do this right. But
(a) $200 billion from Medicare cuts is more than a "fraction."
(b) Please explain to me how the rise is unemployment is going to make a huge difference in the 3.8% on dividends, interest and other unearned income paid by people in the highest tax bracket.
More generally, I would be a fool to say that the CBO has definitively nailed it, and won't be proven wrong. So I never have. But I'm certainly not foolish to say, these things are hard to predict, so the hackish worst-case predictions trotted out by the President's political opponents must all be true.
