Today's New York Post posted an editorial by Scott Gottlieb, a physician and American Enterprise Institute resident fellow, who was a senior official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and is partner to a firm that invests in health-care companies, on the effects of the healthcare bill produced by the Senate Finance Committee which is currently being modified in committee.
As it is currently crafted, the parts of the bill that insure more people and reduce insurance costs don't begin until years after the bill begins imposing large costs on consumers.
According to the article:
"Starting in 2010, the bill would impose annual fees of $2.3 billion on brand-name drugs and $4 billion on medical devices, plus $6.7 billion on certain insurance providers -- and more than $100 billion in cuts to what Medicare pays to health-care providers. These costs will immediately shift onto consumers, in the form of higher prices on medical products and rising premiums.
"Meanwhile, the promised subsidies to help pay for insurance don't fully kick in until 2014. (And those subsidies only go to people earning below 300 percent of the poverty line, or about $66,000 for a family of four.)"
Evidently this was the only way to keep the first-10-years' cost under $900 billion.
What we have here is an accounting gimmick--something Congress is very good at putting forth. What we need to do is make sure the whole plan is rejected and sent back to the drawing board. If you really want to cut costs and insure more people, you need tort reform and insurance portability across state lines. Until Congress puts those two things in a healthcare bill, I will not be convinced that they are actually serious about healthcare reform.
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