Representative Paul Ryan's Comments on ObamaCare Costs

Representative Paul Ryan is a Libertarian-oriented Republican Congressman of the 1st Congressional District of Wisconsin, which is bordered by Illinois, Lake Michigan, the southern suburbs of Milwaukee, and reaches out to Janesville in the west.  Racine and Kenosha are in his district.  Paul Ryan has read Ayn Rand's works and thinks highly of them.  I have heard him speak a number of times at events which the Atlas Society or the Competitive Enterprise Institute were participating in or sponsoring and he has always been a rational voice.  On 25 February, he spoke up at the Health Care Summit called for by Obama to discuss budgetary issues.  While I believe the primary, and completely sufficient, reason to oppose ObamaCare is the personal mandate and the idea that government has the power to decide what is and what is not acceptable health insurance and health care, the budgetary issues are also important.

Congressman Ryan said:

• Medicare has a $38 trillion unfunded liability already, but half a trillion dollars is to be taken from it, so 20% of present Medicare providers will either go out of business or stop serving people on Medicare.
• The cost of Medicaid is growing at a 21% annual rate and is about to bankrupt a number of states.
• The Majority Leader of the Senate claims the Senate bill will reduce the deficit by $131 billion over the next 10 years, which is nonsense.
• The bill collects half a trillion dollars of new taxes for 10 years and cuts Medicare for 10 years, in order to provide revenues for 6 years of ObamaCare spending.
• The first 10 years of ObamaCare will cost $2.3 trillion.
• The Senate bill takes $52 billion from Social Security, which has huge unfunded liabilities already.
• It takes $72 billion from the long-term care insurance program called the CLASS Act.
• The real 10-year cost of ObamaCare will cause a $460 billion deficit, despite the four-year delay in the program and counting taxes in that 4-year period.
• The second 10-year cost of the program is $1.4 trillion.
• For the last 7 years, Congress has not made the kind of 21% doctors payment cuts that are supposed to be part of the savings from Medicare according to the Senate bill.  The savings which will not occur from this cut is $371 billion.
• Far from reducing Medicare's costs as claimed by Obama, the chief actuary at Medicare says medical costs are going up $222 billion.

The Obama camp response to being in deep, deep debt and running deep, deep deficits, is to close your eyes and plow ahead with huge new spending plans.  After all, tomorrow we will all be dead.