CBO real Truth Team, Unemployment rate 15 percent, Obama deficits, 1.2 trillion 2012, Obamacare costs rise and causes millions to lose employer insurance

“And so our goal on health care is, if we can get, instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year, it’s going up at the level of inflation, maybe just slightly above inflation, we’ve made huge progress. And by the way, that is the single most important thing we could do in terms of reducing our deficit. That’s why we did it.”…Barack Obama

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I, therefore, intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt.”…Barack Obama

“the Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of
1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that
the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones.”…George
Orwell, “1984”

Real unemployment rate 15 percent.

From the CBO February 2012.

“The rate of unemployment in the United States has
exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past
three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in
this country since the Great Depression. Moreover, the
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the
unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until
2014. The official unemployment rate excludes those
individuals who would like to work but have not searched
for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are
working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if
those people were counted among the unemployed, the
unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been
about 15 percent. Compounding the problem of high
unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking
for work for more than six months—referred to as the
long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December
2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began
to be collected; it has remained above that level ever
since.”

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/02-16-Unemployment.pdf
Obama budget deficits

From the CBO March 2012.

“This report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) presents an analysis of the proposals contained in the President’s budget request for fiscal year 2013. The analysis is based on CBO’s economic projections and estimating techniques (rather than the Administration’s) and incorporates estimates by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation for the President’s tax proposals.1

In conjunction with analyzing the President’s budget, CBO has updated its baseline budget projections, which were previously issued in January 2012. Unlike its estimates of the President’s budget, CBO’s baseline projections largely reflect the assumption that current tax and spending laws will remain unchanged, so as to provide a benchmark against which potential legislation can be measured. Under that assumption, CBO estimates that the deficit would total $1.2 trillion in 2012 and that cumulative deficits over the 2013–2022 period would amount to $2.9 trillion.”

http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43083

Obamacare cost

From the Amrican Enterprise Institute March 15, 2012.

“CBO: Obamacare could cost $2.1 trillion through 2022”

“According to a new government report, it turns out that more people than first expected will end up getting healthcare through the subsidized insurance exchanges and Medicaid rather than through their employers:

In the original analysis of the impact of the legislation, CBO and JCT estimated that, on balance, the number of people obtaining coverage through their employer would be about 3 million lower in 2019 under the legislation than under prior law. As reflected in CBO’s latest baseline projections, the two agencies now anticipate that, because of the ACA, about 3 million to 5 million fewer people, on net, will obtain coverage through their employer each year from 2019 through 2022 than would have been the case under prior law.

The results acknowledge that if a business chooses not to offer insurance coverage under the ACA, some workers might enroll in Medicaid or CHIP or be eligible to receive subsidies through the insurance exchanges. And as a result, the cost of those programs would increase.

Right now, the updated baseline CBO forecast sees the gross cost of Obamacare through 2022 as $1.8 trillion, a number which includes this new estimate of employee coverage. When you include new taxes, the net cost is $1.3 trillion. (Back in 2010, the ten-year, gross cost was a mere $940 billion, as the bill was structured to back end spending. But now instead of six years of spending estimates, we have nine.)

But under one CBO-JCT scenario, the gross costs through 2022 could be $2.1 trillion if even more businesses than expected decide not to offer health insurance and more people need government subsidized coverage.

But no worry, say the government bean counters, $386 billion in addition taxes (for a total of $895 billion) will cover the difference. First, there would be higher penalty payments by employers and individuals. Second, since health benefits are generally not taxed but wages and salaries are, a shift in the mix of compensation would raise federal revenues.”

http://blog.american.com/2012/03/cbo-obamcare-could-cost-2-1-trillion-through-2022/

Obamacare causes millions to lose employer coverage.

From human Events March 16, 2012.

“The latest revelation, reported at The Hill, is that ObamaCare could cause up to 20 million Americans to lose their health care coverage. There is a “tremendous amount of uncertainty” in the forecast, which is just what our fragile Obamanized economy needs right now, but 20 million is the CBO’s worst-case estimate. Maybe it will only be 3 to 5 million people.

The CBO is actually being very, very conservative in its damage estimates, as industry groups think ObamaCare will nuke closer to 50 million employer-provided policies over the next decade. Amusingly, the CBO points to RomneyCare in Massachusetts as “one piece of evidence that may be relevant” to its projections, as “employment-based health insurance appears to have increased since that state’s reforms.” It will be super awesome to hear Romney debate this with Obama.

ObamaCare kills health insurance by dumping so many mandates on employers that it becomes attractive for them to escape by dropping insurance coverage altogether. Even the CBO’s worst-case projections are underestimating the effect this will have on health insurance, in years to come. What do you think will happen to insurance companies that swiftly lose millions of customers to the “public exchanges?” What will happen to the prices they charge to their diminished customer base… and how will that, in turn, influence other businesses trying to decide whether dropping coverage makes sense?

It is nevertheless significant that the Congressional Budget Office, with its typical static-analysis caution, is predicting that ObamaCare might create a number of uninsured that dwarfs the uninsured population it was ostensibly created to help. If Obama’s true agenda is to destroy private health insurance and clear the way for a socialized medicine takeover, everything is proceeding according to plan.”

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=50264