Some New Conservative Objections to Health Care Reform

In March, 2011 the CBO issued updated estimates to the costs of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), otherwise known as ObamaCare. These updated estimates led to a new round of conservative complaints.

• On March 21 the Republican House Energy and Commerce Committee released a statement claiming that the costs of PPACA had risen by 54%.
• A March, 23 a Wall Street Journal editorial announced that the costs of PPACA had risen by 8.6% since the original CBO estimate a year earlier.

The Washington Post fact checked this and concluded that both figures were inaccurate, and that the projected costs for PPACA have not substantially changed at all.

The gist of the Post article is that the House committee and Journal numbers come from comparing different time frames for the revenue and expenditure aspects of the bill. If you don't trust the Washington Post's fact checking, then you can read the CBO's explanation for yourself.

The money quotes:

The difference is primarily attributable to the different time periods the estimates cover, and not to substantial changes in the year-by-year estimates.

and,

In its ongoing monitoring of developments, CBO has seen no evidence to date that the steps that will be taken to implement the legislation—or the ways in which participants in the health care and health financing systems will respond to the legislation—will yield overall budgetary effects that differ significantly from the ones projected earlier. Therefore, the evolution of the estimates does not reflect any substantial change in the estimation of the overall effects of PPACA and the Reconciliation Act from what was projected in March 2010.

So, the costs of health care reform and its effect on the deficit have NOT changed substantially since it was originally passed.

Another criticism leveled by conservatives is that the effect PPACA will have on the deficit over the next ten years has been deliberately obscured by including 10 years of revenues, but only 6 years of expenditures. This assertion does not withstand careful scrutiny for two reasons.

First, the expenditures during the first 3 years are relatively small, but so are the revenues. Starting in 2014, both the revenues and the expenditures rise substantially. The CBO estimates that PPACA will reduce the deficit in the 2011-2021 period somewhere in the range of 100-150 billion dollars.

Second, in the out years when all of the revenue and expenditure provisions of the bill have been phased in, the deficit reduction is even larger. This is because the savings and revenues grow faster than the increased expenditures.

 
See the original CBO report for details.

The simple fact is that PPACA is essentially a market-oriented attempt to insure more people and lower health care costs that Republicans would almost certainly support were it not for the fact that it is Barack Obama's plan.