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Cornell Study: ObamaCare includes up to $66 billion in unexpected subsidies

Cornell Study: ObamaCare includes up to $66 billion in unexpected subsidies

Cornell professor of policy analysis Dr. Richard Burkhauser, along with Sean Lyons and Indiana University’s Dr. Kosali Simon, has released a study showing that the ObamaCare legislation provides a significant incentive for employers and their employees to take advantage of the taxpayer subsidized insurance exchange.

According to their policy brief, a very conservative estimate of the response to these incentives shows the number of Americans insured by the employer actually drop, with an additional four million people in the government exchange more than policymakers intended at a cost of nearly $20 billion over the $18 billion they expected. This staggering number doesn’t even reflect the fact that many firms are going to drop coverage, a phenomenon McKinsey Quarterly says is going to strike nearly a third of employers.

Where the study gets truly frightening is its more realistic estimate, which takes into account the “accountability” clause in the employer mandate:

If we further allow a broad interpretation of the employer mandate—where “affordability” means employers must make coverage affordable for individuals and their families—the changes are even more dramatic. Employer-sponsored coverage plummets from 74 to 66 percent, with nearly one-quarter of the country’s working-age insured population—over 21 million people—receiving their insurance through the exchange.

This scenario, in which the researchers considered the full reach of the employer mandate and requisite premium adjustments, shows subsidies climbing to more than $66 billion.

In their conclusion, the researchers lament the fact that they have to make assumptions about the meaning of key language in legislation a year after it was passed. Apparently we can’t find out what’s in it even after it passed.

(H/T Cornell Chronicle)

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Comments

And these same people want to write a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution? I don’t think so.

Don’t worry. These subsidies will be wiped out with the across the board cuts in November.

Geez – everything’s “unexpected” with these clowns. 🙁

Fox News did an interview today where they were saying this would lead to an additional cost of over $50 Billion PER YEAR.

If that’s true, than the CBO missed their cost estimate by over $500 Billion (since they estimate for a 10 year period). This in addition to missing the funding estimate by over $500 Billion (since you can’t take $500 Billion out of Medicare, spend it on Medicare to “extend its life” and then spend that same $500 Billion again on Obamacare”.

Also, CBO NEVER scores the administrative costs of legislation. For Obamacare, this is hardly a trivial omission. Obamacare creates 159 NEW bureaucracies / agencies / boards, all of which must be staffed and buildings must be found to house them. The estimated cost comes in at a minimum of $100 Billion.

The IRS alone is provided $10 Billion in new funding just to hire tax collectors to deal with the >$1 trillion tax hike in Obamacare (there’s more than a dozen new taxes, on top of the big increase to the medicare tax).

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

BTW, on another note related to Obamacare, why doesn’t anyone ever talk about the racist aspects of it? I’ve never seen any bill so completely obsessed with race. Obamacare, if ever fully enacted, would institutionalize racial preferences in health care starting with who gets into medical school, where doctors can practice, all the way to who gets approved for life saving procedures and medication, and everything in between. Every doctor and hospital will have to start keeping data on every dollar they spend based on the race of the patient they spend it on, to make sure they’re meeting the racial quotas in Obamacare. How is this not huge national news? Ok, stupid question, I know, but still…