Federal spending on health care only going up…and it is not because of insurance premiums. Check the CBO for yourself

You have heard of the savings generated by the health care reform law, but what you don’t hear is that savings are spent elsewhere.  Rarely do you receive the full story on costs and budget projects.  Many observers tend to focus on the benefits of programs such as health care reform, but fail to look closer at the reality of costs and their implications.  Many changes are indeed important and we do need to assure all Americans have access to good health care (yet to be defined), but we also must avoid pushing ahead without knowing where the costs are leading us.

Here is what CBO says about popular entitlements:

[S]pending on the government’s major mandatory health care programs—Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and health insurance subsidies to be provided through insurance exchanges—along with Social Security will increase from roughly 10 percent of GDP in 2011 to about 16 percent over the next 25 years. If revenues stay close to their average share of GDP for the past 40 years, that rise in spending will lead to rapidly growing budget deficits and surging federal debt. To prevent debt from becoming unsupportable, policymakers will have to substantially restrain the growth of spending, raise revenues significantly above their historical share of GDP, or pursue some combination of those two approaches.

From a Heritage Foundation Tweet

Both Democrats and Republicans like to use the Congressional Budget Office to support their position, generally in misleading ways.  While the CBO is nonpartisan, it makes its estimates based on the laws as presented by Congress and must assume that the law will be implemented as stated and stay that way during the entire period for which an estimate is based, generally not more than ten years.  For example, if HHS grants a number of waivers under PPACA that was not in the original CBO estimate.  If the law is changed so that business to business transactions do not have to issue a 1099, that was not in the original assumptions (by the way that change will cost $ 17,000,000,000 over ten years  based on the original estimates). Of course, the original cost projections also included the infamous Medicare Part B reduction to physician payments which did not happen and never will.

None of this is secret, you can read it all for yourself.  I urge you to visit the CBO Directors Blog and the CBO website and read for yourself the actual words used and the caveats incorporated in CBO reports, most of which never find their way into the media or out of the mouths of politicians.

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