red states rule
04-04-2013, 03:37 AM
Is anyone really surprised that the massive tax bill known as Obamacre is not living up to the long list of promises and hype?
That is what happens when liberalism meets reality face to face
As Obamacare begins to roll out, its champions are beginning to have to confront reality. But because they’re getting a lot of leeway and protection from the political press, the results of this confrontation with the consequences of the law’s poor design and misguided economic assumptions often take the form of little nuggets of truth buried in mountains of frantic, wishful obfuscation. Such was the little nugget buried in the middle of a story (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/us/politics/deadlines-and-lagging-funds-bedevil-obama-health-care-law.html?_r=1&) that was itself buried in the back of the A section of last Friday’s New York Times.
The story was about the enormous challenges of implementing the law, and while it was careful to inform us (in the mouths of unnamed “supporters of the law”) that a lot of these problems are surely functions of the fact that “President Obama has done little to trumpet its benefits, educate the public or answer the critics,” it also notes the following curious fact:
Mr. Obama scored his biggest legislative achievement exactly three years ago when he signed the Affordable Care Act. But this week the administration cautioned officials to be careful about suggesting that the law would drive down costs.
After extensive research, the administration said it was unwise to tell consumers that they could get “health insurance that fits your budget.” That message, it said, is “seen as highly motivational, but not as believable.
This makes it sound like the “extensive research” in question was research into public opinion, which it may well have been. But of course, the more fundamental reason “to be careful about suggesting that the law would drive down costs” is that no one really expects it to do so — not even the administration.
Administration officials and many others on the left who talk about slowing health costs in the coming years never really attribute that expectation in any concrete way to the new law. Rather, they point to the fact that the growth of health costs has slowed a bit during the recession and the painfully slow recovery of the past few years, and they simply expect that slow rate to continue even as they simultaneously expect the economy to recover much more robustly in the coming years.
It’s very important to understand just how much the Left now hangs on this very implausible expectation about health costs. It is at the core of the Democrats’ fiscal arguments, and at the core of their optimistic assumptions about how Obamacare will work out.
That expectation is, to begin with, what allows Paul Krugman and others (including administration officials) to suggest that we just don’t have to worry about the deficit and debt at this point because they will be pretty stable for about a decade before beginning a catastrophic rise that would crush the economy. That’s what amounts to fiscal optimism these days, and it’s the essence of the Democrats’ resistance to entitlement reform. It is embodied, for instance, in this chart that you’d find if you trudged through the president’s 2013 budget proposal all the way to the 510-page “analytical perspectives (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Analytical_Perspectives)” volume that was released with the budget:
http://www.nationalreview.com/sites/default/files/nfs/uploaded/u1842/2013/03/OMB%20chart1.jpg
This projection, which predicts an epic disaster for the American economy if we remain on our current fiscal course in the long run, is, to repeat, a very rosy view, since it suggests we have about ten years of relative stability (if at a high level of debt) in which to change course before the steep upward trajectory of debt resumes — although the people who use this figure somehow use it to argue against changing course. But in any case, even this sorry excuse for optimism is only made possible by the notion that the growth of health costs won’t soon return to even its postwar norm, let alone to its norm of the last two decades. It assumes, for instance, that Medicare spending will only be 3.3 percent of GDP in 2020, while the Congressional Budget Office assumes it will be 4.2 percent of GDP — a huge difference. And it’s a difference that has a massive effect on medium and long-term expectations. The CBO uses somewhat less rosy assumptions (but still assumes health-cost growth will take a while to resume), and so expects federal debt to reach 200 percent of GDP not in 2080 but in 2037 — again, a huge difference, which means the CBO sees a far steeper rise in deficits and debt in the near and medium term.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/344080/unaffordable-care-act-yuval-levin
That is what happens when liberalism meets reality face to face
As Obamacare begins to roll out, its champions are beginning to have to confront reality. But because they’re getting a lot of leeway and protection from the political press, the results of this confrontation with the consequences of the law’s poor design and misguided economic assumptions often take the form of little nuggets of truth buried in mountains of frantic, wishful obfuscation. Such was the little nugget buried in the middle of a story (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/us/politics/deadlines-and-lagging-funds-bedevil-obama-health-care-law.html?_r=1&) that was itself buried in the back of the A section of last Friday’s New York Times.
The story was about the enormous challenges of implementing the law, and while it was careful to inform us (in the mouths of unnamed “supporters of the law”) that a lot of these problems are surely functions of the fact that “President Obama has done little to trumpet its benefits, educate the public or answer the critics,” it also notes the following curious fact:
Mr. Obama scored his biggest legislative achievement exactly three years ago when he signed the Affordable Care Act. But this week the administration cautioned officials to be careful about suggesting that the law would drive down costs.
After extensive research, the administration said it was unwise to tell consumers that they could get “health insurance that fits your budget.” That message, it said, is “seen as highly motivational, but not as believable.
This makes it sound like the “extensive research” in question was research into public opinion, which it may well have been. But of course, the more fundamental reason “to be careful about suggesting that the law would drive down costs” is that no one really expects it to do so — not even the administration.
Administration officials and many others on the left who talk about slowing health costs in the coming years never really attribute that expectation in any concrete way to the new law. Rather, they point to the fact that the growth of health costs has slowed a bit during the recession and the painfully slow recovery of the past few years, and they simply expect that slow rate to continue even as they simultaneously expect the economy to recover much more robustly in the coming years.
It’s very important to understand just how much the Left now hangs on this very implausible expectation about health costs. It is at the core of the Democrats’ fiscal arguments, and at the core of their optimistic assumptions about how Obamacare will work out.
That expectation is, to begin with, what allows Paul Krugman and others (including administration officials) to suggest that we just don’t have to worry about the deficit and debt at this point because they will be pretty stable for about a decade before beginning a catastrophic rise that would crush the economy. That’s what amounts to fiscal optimism these days, and it’s the essence of the Democrats’ resistance to entitlement reform. It is embodied, for instance, in this chart that you’d find if you trudged through the president’s 2013 budget proposal all the way to the 510-page “analytical perspectives (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Analytical_Perspectives)” volume that was released with the budget:
http://www.nationalreview.com/sites/default/files/nfs/uploaded/u1842/2013/03/OMB%20chart1.jpg
This projection, which predicts an epic disaster for the American economy if we remain on our current fiscal course in the long run, is, to repeat, a very rosy view, since it suggests we have about ten years of relative stability (if at a high level of debt) in which to change course before the steep upward trajectory of debt resumes — although the people who use this figure somehow use it to argue against changing course. But in any case, even this sorry excuse for optimism is only made possible by the notion that the growth of health costs won’t soon return to even its postwar norm, let alone to its norm of the last two decades. It assumes, for instance, that Medicare spending will only be 3.3 percent of GDP in 2020, while the Congressional Budget Office assumes it will be 4.2 percent of GDP — a huge difference. And it’s a difference that has a massive effect on medium and long-term expectations. The CBO uses somewhat less rosy assumptions (but still assumes health-cost growth will take a while to resume), and so expects federal debt to reach 200 percent of GDP not in 2080 but in 2037 — again, a huge difference, which means the CBO sees a far steeper rise in deficits and debt in the near and medium term.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/344080/unaffordable-care-act-yuval-levin