The Congressional Budget Office on Thursday has come out with some additional analysis of the Democratic health care reform bill in the Senate and it found that expanding Medicaid to include anyone earning below 150 percent of the poverty level would increase the national debt by more than $1 trillion in the next decade. In a letter that responds to a series of questions from Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., who is the top Republican on the Senate panel that wrote the bill, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf said the bill would end up hurting worker wages and employment.”
CBO believes that firms that are subject to the penalty but opt not to offer health insurance would pass that cost on to their workers, primarily in the form of lower wages, just as firms that offer insurance today and contribute toward the premiums pay lower wages than they otherwise would, keeping their total compensation costs about the same,” Elmendorf wrote.
He added that for workers who earn close to minimum wage, the result could be job loss.
Elmendorf said he also estimates that the Senate bill would result in 6 million people who have employer-based insurance to lose that coverage, and he predicts that if the bill is implemented, overall national spending on health care will increase from two percent to five percent, “largely because insured people generally receive somewhat more medical care than do uninsured people‚ notwithstanding the fact that some newly insured people would avoid expensive treatments by getting care sooner, before their illness
progressed.”
Enzi said the latest CBO information shows the Democratic health care proposals “fall far short of the president’s promises,” outlined in his Wednesday night speech and demonstrates the need to produce the bipartisan bill that he is helping to write with Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.
“I hope that the president and Democrats will set aside these flawed bills and work with us to develop a reasonable consensus and step-by-step approach that the American people can support,” Enzi said.
