dropdeadpolitics

Representative Paul Ryan, a rising star in the Republican Party has been attacking the recent health care reform bill as a deficit killer. He claims that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) numbers mask greater costs therefore Obama’s pledge to only sign a deficit reducing bill was broken. Ryan, known to be a budget expert and fiscal hawk is clearly playing politics and I will debunk his entire argument while putting the numbers into perspective. The GOP has a habit of distorting the truth so with just a little digging it is easy to expose their tricks and knock down their house of cards.

Ryan claims that the infamous “doc fix” should be addressed in this bill and added to the total cost of the bill. The “doc fix” is an issue that predates this bill and has nothing to do with the reform that was passed. This is an obvious attempt to conflate two separate issues and trick the American people into thinking the two are one in the same simply because the word “doctor” is referenced.  The doc fix originally came out of negotiations with the American Medical Association. The maneuver would “fix” payments to doctors at a single level or increase them over 10 years.  In 1997, a law was passed that mandated the payments Medicare makes to doctors be cut every year. The doc fix did not pass the Senate in 2009, though it has been suggested that the Democratic Party made a deal with the AMA that the doc fix would eventually be passed; in exchange, the AMA supposedly threw its support behind the health care reform bill. The doc fix has been estimated to cost several trillion dollars over 10 years.

How can Ryan say that a $208 billion dollar problem, years in the making should be added to the costs of a completely separate and new initiative to reform insurance and expand coverage? If the bill never passed then the $208 billion would still need to be addressed so that cost is a constant that can’t be added into a new bill that does not address the issue. If you took the “doc fix” out of the equation like it should be then the program still lowers the deficit using his own numbers but less than the Democrats claim. The whole deficit argument hinges on tricking people into thinking the “doc fix” has anything to do with this bill.

Ryan claims that if you included the “doc fix” along with other accounting discrepancies in the bill that the real 10 year deficit of the bill would be $59 billion or $5.9 billion per year for the next ten years.  (As if $59b to expand coverage to 95% of Americans wouldn’t be worth it anyway) Since the “doc fix” is estimated to cost $208 billion over 10 years yet Ryan claims if it were included in the bill that it would result in a $59 billion deficit over the same 10 year span it is easy to see that the bill does indeed cut the deficit evidenced by it mitigating the $208 billion dollar costs.

Lets for arguments sake concede that it should be part of the new bill and the costs should be folded in and that all of Ryan’s other objections to the accounting are correct. Ryan inadvertently proves with his own numbers that the reform bill does indeed lower our deficits. Let’s examine addressing the “doc fix” with and without the health care bill. Either way it costs the same $208 billion but because of the other deficit reducing factors of the reform bill the overall deficit per year is smaller.

Included with health care reform:

10 year deficit: $59 billion
yearly deficit: $5.9 billion

Without health care reform just fixing “doc fix”:

10 year deficit: $208 billion
yearly deficit: $20.8

This little kindergarten math proves several things:

1. The “doc fix” is an issue either way
2. The reform bill does bring down the deficit offsetting the cost of the “doc fix”
3. Ryan and the GOP are full of crap

As you can see the “doc fix” issue needs to be addressed either way but the deficit reducing properties of the health care reform bill(using Ryan’s numbers) actually helps to pay for that preexisting condition lowering the yearly deficit but close to $15 billion a year!

It’s clear that the GOP and Ryan are politically motivated to attack and discredit this historic reform at all costs. Many of their supporters have bought this political trickery hook, line and sinker.  It’s a shame that so many are fooled by such a transparent political gimmick but my above critique easily exposed it for the nonsense that it is. I also find it beyond funny that the GOP just had the reins of power and passed every single major initiative without even the attempt to pay for it. A trillion dollar entitlement program, 2 tax cuts and 2 wars all on the credit card all supported in lockstep by the GOP. Now they want to take a bill that is paid for and parse it to death trying to distort its costs. How anyone can take these guys seriously amidst their record and obvious political motivations is beyond me.

In conclusion, the bill is now law and while not perfect it does move us in the right direction. The “doc fix” issue will be addressed either way but the passage of the deficit reducing insurance reform bill has gone a long way towards paying that problem while expanding coverage to nearly 31 million Americans. It banned insurance companies from dropping coverage and excluding people with preexisting conditions all while lowering our deficits. It’s an historic bill and monumental achievement for President Obama and the Democrats and the GOP can go into the 2010 midterm elections as the bitter do nothing party to their own peril.