House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says the conglomerated House health care reform bill--rolled out today at a news conference outside the Capitol--will be deficit neutral, a key qualification for getting moderates on board.
"The bill is fiscally sound, will not add one dime to the deficit," Pelosi proclaimed.
The bill features a public option that lets doctors negotiate their payment rates, a step back from liberals' preferred policy of pegging reimbursement rates to those used in Medicare.
It will reduce the deficit by $30 billion over the first ten years of its enactment, according to a fact sheet released by the Speaker's office based on preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
Total spending for the first ten years is $894 billion--just under the $900 billion mark set by President Obama and a shade higher than the $829 billion contained in the public-option-less Senate Finance Committee Bill, which, according to the CBO, would save the government $81 billion over its first decade.
How does this work? Because, as the Washington Post reported, of more budget trickery to take advantage of the ten-year window. The bill adds a new long-term care benefit/insurance program, but:
The bill is "deficit neutral" over ten years in this way all over. Start taxing and taking premiums in immediately, provide benefits only starting in 2014, ramp up fully in 2016. The bill reduces the deficit until about 2014, then increases the deficit thereafter.
The WaPo story you linked to appears to be about a different piece of legislation regarding long-term care insurance and not the latest version of Pelosi’s health care bill.
That being said, both the last House bill and the Baucus bill used the same sort of budgetary shenanigans you’re describing – using ten years of taxes and fines to finance six or seven years of new spending in order to claim that it doesn’t increase or actually decreases the deficit over the CBO’s ten-year horizon. Unless and until we see otherwise, it’s probably safe to assume that they’re trying to pull the same thing again.
BTW: since most of the “savings” in these bills seem to consist of “cuts” to Medicare (or rather reductions in the rate of growth) which supporters of these bills say won’t adversely affect patient care and are necessary since Medicare is going broke (not to mention the fact that we’re already running record deficits), Congress should just pass those “cuts” in a standalone bill rather than using them to create another program for them to mismanage.
Yet now with the Senate bill, not only is there said to be a savings over the first 10 year period, but a massive savings over the subsequent 10 years:
"Aides said the mammoth, 2,074-page bill would reduce deficits by $127 billion over a decade and by as much as $650 billion in the 10 years that follow, citing as-yet-unreleased estimates by the Congressional Budget Office."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_health_care_overhaul