Nail in the Coffin or the Straw that breaks the Camel's Back?

This will either seal the fate of the Dem's assault on American private health care or it will result in the most massive destroy the messenger campaign the haters in the democratic party have devised.

The NON-PARTISON Congressional Budget Office has scored the bill being debated in the US Senate and found that there will be NO SAVINGS by adopting the proposal.

No, Mr. Chairman. In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.

President Obama has been going everywhere and saying that the economic recovery depends on reining in the cost of health care.

However, the director of the CBO, Doug Elmendorf finds that this will not happen...to the contrary, the "cost curve" will not be "bent" downward...it will be raised by driving up the costs to the Federal Government.

Elmendorf finds the transfer of responsibility to the Feds will result in an increase in demand for health care thus raising overall costs without any savings in unit costs.

As we wrote in our letter to you and Senator Gregg, the creation of a new subsidy for health insurance, which is a critical part of expanding health insurance coverage in our judgement, would by itself increase the federal responsibility for health care that raises federal spending on health care. It raises the amount of activity that is growing at this unsustainable rate and to offset that there has to be very substantial reductions in other parts of the federal commitment to health care, either on the tax revenue side through changes in the tax exclusion or on the spending side through reforms in Medicare and Medicaid. Certainly reforms of that sort are included in some of the packages, and we are still analyzing the reforms in the House package. Legislation was only released as you know two days ago. But changes we have looked at so far do not represent the fundamental change on the order of magnitude that would be necessary to offset the direct increase in federal health costs from the insurance coverage proposals.

So fundamental to reining in costs is massive increase in targeted revenue (taxing private plans) or slashing benefits (pushing Medicaid responsibility to the already cash-strapped States or cutting benefits to Medicare recipients). This is because the experts see so much of health care activity being subsidized because the user does not have a responsibility for managing the cost. That sounds rather conservative, doesn't it?

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