• 
  
• "Since its founding in 1974, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has produced independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process ... CBO does not make policy recommendations, and each report and cost estimate discloses the agency's assumptions and methodologies."

• 
  
• “The ACA allows many individuals and families to purchase subsidized insurance through the exchanges (or marketplaces) operated either by the federal government or by a state government.”

Quote:

 

http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43752
Letter to the Honorable Darrell E. Issa Providing Additional Information About CBO's Cost Estimate for H.R. 4872
December 6, 2012

This letter responds to Chairman Darrell E. Issa’s request for information about CBO’s March 20, 2010, cost estimate for H.R. 4872, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, in combination with H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Specifically, the chairman asked for a description and explanation of CBO’s assumption that the premium assistance tax credits established by that legislation would be available in every state, including states where the insurance exchanges would be established by the federal government.
To the best of our recollection, the possibility that those subsidies would only be available in states that created their own exchanges did not arise during the discussions CBO staff had with a wide range of Congressional staff when the legislation was being considered. Nor was the issue raised during consideration of earlier versions of the legislation in 2009 and 2010, when CBO had anticipated, in its analyses, that the credits would be available in every state. CBO’s analysts reviewed H.R. 4872 and H.R. 3590 to try to ensure that the agency's estimate accurately reflected the legislative language, as they do for all legislation that they analyze, but that question did not arise in the course of that review, and CBO did not perform a separate legal analysis of that issue.

• 
  
• “CBO’s analysts reviewed [Obamacare laws] to try to ensure that the agency's estimate accurately reflected the legislative language.”
  

from Chatham...

 

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/conncarroll/2015/01/26/cbo-deficits-to-explode-as-obama-leaves-office-n1948435
CBO: Deficits To Explode As Obama Leaves Office

more from Chatham...

 

...Immediately after Obama leaves office, however, deficits are expected to rise steadily thanks mostly to growth in mandatory health care spending programs like Obamacare. By 2025 the CBO estimates that our nation's federal deficits will again top $1 trillion a year. For comparison's sake the highest deficit ever under President Bush was $458 billion.



According to the CBO, in 2017 the federal government will be spending $384 billion a year on Medicaid, almost double what it spent before Obama became president. Spending on Obamacare's insurance exchanges ...to $93 billion in 2017.

• 
  
• Repeal of the permanent reductions in the annual updates to Medicare’s payment rates for most services in the fee-for-service sector (other than physicians’ services) would increase Medicare outlays by $379 billion. (That figure excludes interactions between those provisions and others—namely, the effects of those changes on payments to Medicare Advantage plans and collections of Part B premiums.)

• 
  
• "I think what we do know is the health care bill costs over $1 trillion," Cantor told Hill. "And we know it was full of budget gimmickry. And it spends money we don't have in this country."

kbp

Jan 27 2015, 10:26 AM

Note that Obamacare was law as of March 23, 2010. Barry did not create the Debt to GDP ratio increase, but he OWNS the continuation of it after about 2010.

Baldo

Jan 27 2015, 11:04 AM

CBO: Obamacare to cost $2 trillion over the next decade
Jan 26

President Obama's healthcare law will spend about $2 trillion over the next decade on expanding insurance coverage but still leave 31 million Americans uninsured, according to an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office released on Monday.

When Obama pitched the healthcare law to Congress, he said it would cost "around $900 billion" over 10 years. But his statement was misleading because the way the law was designed, the major spending provisions didn't kick in until 2014. This meant that 10-year estimates at the time the law was passed in 2010 were artificially low, because they included four years (2010 through 2013) in which spending was negligible.

The new CBO analysis finds that between fiscal years 2016 and 2025, spending on the law's expansion of Medicaid will cost $920 billion and insurance exchange subsidies will cost nearly $1.1 trillion. The major spending provisions, taken together, will total $1.993 trillion.

Obamacare does include tax increases and Medicare cuts that previous CBO reports have found would offset the new spending, but CBO is no longer providing a full budgetary analysis of the law.

The CBO also said it expected the law's exchanges to cover 21 million by the end of the 2016 fiscal year and for Medicaid to cover an additional 13 million — gains that it projects will be partially offset by a reduction of 11 million people in employer or other existing coverage.

By 2025, the end of the projection period, the CBO projects that Obamacare will increase insurance coverage by a net of 27 million, while 31 million will remain uninsured.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/cbo-obamacare-to-cost-2-trillion-over-the-next-decade/article/2559276

Quote:

 

http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/01/scotus-institutional-legitimacy-not-at-stake-in-king-v-burwell/

SCOTUS “institutional legitimacy” not at stake in King v. Burwell
Posted by Bryan Jacoutot

The upcoming Supreme Court case of King v. Burwell holds much in the balance, including the very financial sustainability of President Obama’s signature law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). If the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs, the ability for the law to support itself would almost certainly collapse.

At issue in King is the legality of an IRS rule allowing exchanges operated by the federal government to issue tax subsidies to qualified individuals purchasing health insurance through the exchange.

This is an incredibly complex issue, and many courts, scholars, and commentators have spent thousands upon thousands (upon thousands) of pages of argument attempting to arrive at the proper conclusion. Ultimately, we must wait until the Supreme Court decides this case at the end of the term to learn the definitive conclusion.

The complexity of the law notwithstanding, many commentators remain convinced that any ruling against the government would be one for politics over the law, leading to familiar questions of the “institutional legitimacy” of the Supreme Court should they rule against the government. This is nothing new, especially when it comes to the issue of PPACA. Indeed, in the wake of the 2012 PPACA challenge, a litany of law professors and legal scholars shared in the assessment that striking down PPACA would result in substantial costs “for the Court as institution and for its credibility carrying out its vital national role going forward.”

Despite the pattern of many scholars to tie the legitimacy of the Court to ruling in favor of PPACA proponents, I honestly believe the “sky is falling” rhetoric regarding King v. Burwell to be severely overblown.

The primary contention of those who believe the institutional legitimacy of the Court is at stake in this case is that holding against the government would be a departure from a vital administrative law axiom known as the Chevron deference standard.

As Michael Cannon and Professor Jonathan Adler point out in their excellent article, the Chevron deference test is a two-step inquiry:

• 
  
• First, the reviewing court considers the statutory text to determine “whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue.” If so, the statute controls, “for the court, as well as the agency, must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress.” If the reviewing court concludes that the statute is “silent or ambiguous,” however, and determines the interpretive authority has been delegated to the agency, the court must defer to the agency’s statutory interpretation, so long as it ‘is based on a permissible construction of the statute.’”

In other words, step-two requires the agency interpretation of ambiguous statute prevail unless it is “arbitrary, capricious, or manifestly contrary to the statute.”

As a result, the government’s contention largely rests on the premise that ambiguity exists in the statutory language of Obamacare, and thus, the IRS should be accorded due deference to craft rules consistent with their interpretation (one that obviously would entail the continued existence of the federal exchange tax subsidies).

The entire issue of King can be boiled down to the IRS Rule’s inconsistency with the language of three sections of the PPACA: §1311, §1321 and §1401.

Section 1311 creates the authority for an “exchange established by the State.” Likewise, Section 1321 creates the authority for the federal government to create “such exchange” in the event a state refuses to establish a Section 1311 exchange (which, much to the surprise of the law’s drafters, has occurred in more than half the states).

Finally, Section 1401 allows for tax credits to be issued for “Exchanges established by the State under 1311.” And therein lies the problem for the government’s position. Section 1321 exchanges are not “established by the State,” and they certainly are not “established by the State under 1311.” No, Section 1321 exchanges are established by the federal government under Section 1321.

Lawyers may quibble all they want about whether Section 1321 exchanges, for all intents and purposes, are 1311 exchanges. For all their legal gymnastics, however, Section 1321 exchanges simply can never be “Exchanges established by the State.” Indeed, follow the absurdity of the government’s reading of the statute here:

• 
  
• A federally created Section 1321 Exchange = an Exchange established by the State under 1311.

Such a reading is simply too far a departure from the plain reading of the statute as to give it the weight necessary to create the statutory ambiguity required under Chevron.

With no need to grant deference under Chevron, separation of powers issues — at least with respect to Court — do not come into play in this case. As a result, even if the Court rules for the plaintiffs, the “institutional legitimacy” of the Court ought to (once more) be safe for another day.

Quote:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/26/the-obama-administration-wants-to-dramatically-change-how-doctors-are-paid/

The Obama administration wants to dramatically change how doctors are paid

The Obama administration on Monday announced an ambitious goal to overhaul the way doctors are paid, tying their fees more closely to the quality of care rather than the quantity.

Rather than pay more money to Medicare doctors simply for every procedure they perform, the government will also evaluate whether patients are healthier, among other measures. The goal is for half of all Medicare payments to be handled this way by 2018.

[...]

Critics say the traditional payment scheme fails to discourage overuse of health-care services, without holding providers accountable for whether patients’ get healthier.

Medicare has been experimenting with payment models for more than a decade, and the 2010 Affordable Care Act tried to tackle the issue by expanding payment models that reward providers for the value of care they provide.

[...]

...the administration's announcement sends a clear signal that the health-care system is quickly moving away from a system that allows for so much waste.

[...]

"We still know very little about how best to design and implement [value-based payment] programs to achieve stated goals and what constitutes a successful program," concluded a 2014 Rand Corporation study funded by HHS. The report, which reviewed pay-for-performance models implemented over the past decade, said improvements were "typically modest" and often hard to evaluate. [They're going to provide BILLIONS and BILLIONS in "savings" for us ...or else our taxes must go up!]

[...]

Two high-profile ACA programs encouraging health-care providers to work as accountable care organizations have resulted in modest savings to the Medicare program so far, about $877 million. But at least 13 of the 32 organizations that participated in the most ambitious of these efforts — the Pioneer ACO program — have dropped out of the program in the past two years.

[...]

Quote:

 

Millions to owe Obamacare tax penalty

Were you uninsured in 2014? It's time to pay the piper!
Some 3 million to 6 million Americans will have to pay an Obamacare tax penalty for not having health insurance last year, Treasury officials said Wednesday. It's the first time they have given estimates for how many people will be subject to a fine.

The penalty is $95, or 1% of income above a certain threshold (roughly $20,000 for a couple). So you could end up owing the IRS a lot of money.

Take a married couple with $100,000 in income - their bill comes to $797, according to the Tax Policy Center ACA penalty calculator.

The penalty for remaining uninsured rises to the larger of $325 or 2% of income in 2015.

Quote:

 

Some three-quarters of the nation's 150 million taxpayers have health insurance through their jobs or government programs and will simply have to check a box on the Form 1040.

Another 15 million to 30 million people will request and be granted an exemption to the mandate by filing Form 8965. Those who aren't subject to the insurance requirement include undocumented immigrants, low-income Americans and those for whom insurance premiums were more than 8% of their household income.

Related: Obamacare tax surprise looming

Finally, between 4.5 million and 7.5 million taxpayers received subsidies for insurance premiums when they signed up for coverage on Obamacare exchanges. They will have to use Form 8962 to reconcile their actual 2014 income with the amount they estimated when they applied for a policy in late 2013 or early 2014.

Those who underestimated their income either will receive smaller tax refunds or will owe the IRS money.

Treasury officials declined to forecast how many people may be in this situation. But H&R Block projects 3.4 million taxpayers will have to pay back part of their premiums.

Mason - from DC Cesspool thread

 

CBO covering the Democrat's asses!

http://www.atr.org/cbo-still-refuses-score-obamacare-ignores-15-tax-hikes-healthcare-law

Quote:

 

[...]

List of tax hikes ignored in the CBO half-score of Obamacare

• 
  
• -3.8 percent surtax on investment income
  -Hike in top Medicare payroll tax rate to 3.8 percent
  -Medicine cabinet tax
  -Additional surtax on health savings account (HSA) distributions
  -Cap on flexible spending accounts (FSAs)
  -Medical device tax
  -High medical bills tax
  -Tanning tax
  -Tax on employer retiree drug coverage in Medicare
  -Charitable hospital tax
  -Pharmaceutical manufacturers tax
  -Health insurance tax
  -Tax on executive compensation in the health sector
  -"Black liquor" tax hike
  -Codification of "economic substance doctrine"

All these tax increases can be read about in detail here.