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DonViejo

(60,536 posts) Mon Mar 13, 2017, 09:47 AM Mar 2017

No, The CBO Was Not 'Way, Way Off' On Scoring Obamacare

By ALICE OLLSTEIN PublishedMARCH 13, 2017, 6:00 AM EDT

Aiming to erode public trust in the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office ahead of its report this week expected to show that the GOP's Obamacare repeal bill will cause millions of people to lose their health insurance, Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials are rewriting the history of the CBO's analysis of the Affordable Care Act.

"If the CBO was right about Obamacare to begin with, there’d be 8 million more people on Obamacare today than there actually are," White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told ABC on Sunday. "So I love the folks at the CBO, they work really hard, they do, but sometimes we ask them to do stuff they’re not capable of doing."

On Sunday's "Meet the Press," Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price piled on. "CBO has been very adept in not providing appropriate coverage statistics," he said. But in interviews with TPM, budget experts – including the CBO director during the conception and implementation of Obamacare – paint a very different picture.

They argue that the office's projections of how many total people would gain coverage under Obamacare and of the average cost of health insurance premiums turned out to be quite close to the eventual reality. The office missed the mark in some areas, they said, due to unpredictable developments like the Supreme Court ruling that allowed states to refuse to expand Medicaid.

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/cbo-obamacare-american-health-care-act

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No, The CBO Was Not 'Way, Way Off' On Scoring Obamacare (Original Post) DonViejo Mar 2017 OP

Other recent articles claim Obamacare has brought down heath care costs more than predicted wishstar Mar 2017 #1

Just a question Timmygoat Mar 2017 #2

Under the ACA insurance companies can make 18-20% profit csziggy Mar 2017 #3

wishstar

(5,271 posts)

1. Other recent articles claim Obamacare has brought down heath care costs more than predicted

Reply to DonViejo (Original post)

Mon Mar 13, 2017, 10:20 AM

Mar 2017

ACA could have been better if Repub states hadn't refused Medicaid expansion and had helped facilitate state exchanges. Also people who didn't initially enroll because of the Repub negativity could have had their health conditions treated before getting so severe than when they did finally enroll, it cost insurance companies much more to help them, resulting in premiums going up and insurance companies dropping out.

Timmygoat

(779 posts)

2. Just a question

Reply to DonViejo (Original post)

Mon Mar 13, 2017, 10:57 AM

Mar 2017

I am not too informed on the subject,does anyone have an idea what the health insurance companies cut
out of our claims is? I do not understand how we allow them to make a profit out of sick people.

Also,when politicians talk about the medicare trust fund and how it will be depleted sometime soon,are they accounting
for the money going in, and why don't they raise the cap on it by a very small amount, this seems like it would be easy to fix.

csziggy

(34,136 posts)

3. Under the ACA insurance companies can make 18-20% profit

Reply to Timmygoat (Reply #2)

Mon Mar 13, 2017, 12:16 PM

Mar 2017

Under the proposed Trumpcare (or DonTcare) I believe that figure goes up to 30% and exorbitant CEO pay can be written off as an expense and not counted as part of that profit.

Here's the secret payoff to health insurance CEOs buried in the GOP Obamacare repeal bill
Michael Hiltzik
March 7, 2017

<SNIP>

As part of an effort to rein in soaring executive pay, the ACA decreed that health insurance companies could deduct from their taxes only $500,000 of the pay of each top executive. That’s a tighter restriction than the limit imposed on other corporations, which is $1 million per executive. The ACA closed a loophole for insurance companies enjoyed by other corporations, which could deduct the cost of stock options and other “performance-based” pay; for insurance companies, the deduction cap is $500,000 per executive, period.

<SNIP>

The House Republican bill repeals the compensation limit as of the end of this year. The GOP hasn’t exactly trumpeted this provision; it’s six lines on page 67 of the measure, labeled “Remuneration from Certain Insurers” and referring only to the obscure IRS code section imposing the limit. Repeal of the provision apparently means that the insurers will be able to deduct $1 million in cash per executive, plus the cost of “performance-based” stock awards and options, like other corporations.

The Institute for Policy Studies calculated in 2014 that the 10 biggest insurance companies had paid their top 57 executives a total of $300 million the previous year. Because of the ACA rule, they were able to deduct only 27% of the sum. Without the ACA, they would have been able to deduct 96%.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-obamacare-ceos-20170307-story.html

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