CB Report: Soaring Deficits & 10Million Mor Uninsured

Political & Economic Analysis

 

What Mainstream Media Missed: New CBO Report Shows Soaring Deficits By 2025

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BY TERRY JONES

01/27/2015 05:26 PM ET

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You might have seen the good-news headlines in the media touting the most recent Congressional Budget Office forecast that deficits will shrink over the next two years.
What you didn't see was this: That over the next decade, deficits will soar out of control, totaling $7.6 trillion over that time, and that by 2025 we will be running $1 trillion annual deficits in perpetuity unless something's done.
Even that gloomy assessment, by the way, assumes that Congress does nothing in the intervening years to increase the deficit. Good luck with that.
This is more than just an accounting debate. America's finances are in such bad shape that the CBO expects total public debt to surge from $13 trillion today to $21.6 trillion by 2025, a 66% rise. This, the CBO helpfully points out, is "unsustainable." That means it eventually leads to national insolvency.
How did this problem arise? Spending, of course - especially on entitlements. Outlays for Social Security, health care and interest on the debt will grow sharply in the next decade, pushing up total federal spending from 20.3% of GDP this year to 22.3% in 2025. Revenues, meanwhile, are expected to stay flat at around 18% of GDP, leaving a huge hole in the budget.
As the bipartisan budget watch group the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget noted in a report, "Ultimately, it will take a significant package of entitlement and tax reforms to truly put the debt on a sustainable path."
That's true, but it will never happen unless we all stop talking about nonsense issues like football's Deflategate and the bogus threat of global warming and address out-of-control spending on entitlements that threaten our children and our children's children with generational bankruptcy.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/blogs-capital-hill/012715-736535-deficits-debt-set-to-soar-new-cbo-report-shows.htm#ixzz3Q83Z3hp8
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January 27, 2015

CBO Now Says 10 Mil Will Lose Employer Health Plans Under ObamaCare

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

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Health Reform: The Congressional Budget Office now says ObamaCare will push 10 million off employer-based coverage, a tenfold increase from its initial projection. The "keep your plan" lie just gets bigger and bigger.
The latest CBO report is supposed to be a big win for the Obama administration because the projected costs are 20% below what the CBO first projected in 2010.
But the CBO report also shows that ObamaCare will be far more disruptive to the employer-based insurance market, while being far less effective at cutting the ranks of the uninsured, than promised.
Thanks to ObamaCare, the CBO now expects that 10 million workers will lose their employer-based coverage by 2021.
This finding stands in sharp contrast to earlier CBO projections, which at one point suggested ObamaCare would increase the number of people getting coverage through work, at least in its early years.
The budget office has, in fact, increased the number it says will lose workplace coverage every year since 2011.
The latest CBO finding also thoroughly debunks the many promises ObamaCare backers made when selling the law — about how those with work-based coverage had nothing to worry about.
ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber, for example, said the law was specifically designed "to leave those who are happy with their employer-sponsored insurance alone."
Then Washington Post reporter Ezra Klein reassured readers that "for most companies ... there's little reason to expect their behavior will change."
The White House insisted that "respected independent analysts have concluded that the number of Americans who get their health insurance at work will not change in a significant way."
Obama endlessly repeated his iron-clad guarantee that those who liked their plans could keep them.
And those who suggested at the time that employers might take advantage of ObamaCare to offload their health costs onto taxpayers by dumping workers into the government exchanges were told to read those now-discredited CBO reports.
At the same time CBO was upping ObamaCare's impact on work-based insurance, it's been downgrading the impact on the uninsured.
The CBO now says ObamaCare will leave 31 million uninsured after more than a decade, up from its 23 million forecast made in 2011.
Put another way, the CBO promised that ObamaCare would cover 60% of the uninsured.
Now it says the program will cover less than half, despite spending $2 trillion to subsidize premiums and expand Medicaid.
Does anyone really believe that if Obama announced a plan to spend $2 trillion on a program that would leave 31 million uninsured and force 10 million workers off their employer-based insurance, that even Democrats would have voted for it?