“Even before the president signed the ACA into law, non-partisan analysts demonstrated that the belief it would reduce federal deficits was based on a misunderstanding of government accounting,” wrote Charles Blahous, a trust of the two major entitlement programs and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “The ACA’s projected savings from Medicare payment reductions were in effect being doubly committed: once to extend Medicare solvency and a second time to fund a massive coverage expansion,” noted Blahous. “Both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Medicare Chief Actuary alerted Congress to the problem at the time.” In 2012, Blahous wrote a paper explaining that the Affordable Care Act — or “ObamaCare,” as Americans have come to know it — would add $340 billion to the federal budget deficit over 10 years because of the double-counting of Medicare savings and the suspension of the CLASS Act, a provision of the law deemed unworkable.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 19:35:11 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015