Tarpley & Underwood
Financial Advisors, LLC
CLEARING UP THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE
Who would fund the reforms?
Would there really be "death panels"?
Sorting out the possibilities, facts, and misconceptions.
The town hall debates over health care reform have ignited Americans like few recent issues. Discourses have become shouting matches. Away from the noise, here is a roundup of where things currently stand.
Who Would Pay for All This? Over the next 10 years, the federal government will need (by President Obama’s estimation) $950 billion to fund its health care programs. As planned, roughly a third of the money will be raised through increased revenues (i.e., limiting tax deductions for the wealthiest Americans) and two-thirds of it is supposed to come from reallocations of taxpayer money the federal government is already scheduled to receive.1 A coalition of pharmaceutical industry CEOs met with the President in July and have since pledged $80 billion in cost savings over the coming decade to help pay for the reform.2
Would Medicare Be Cut? Republicans and Democrats disagree. “Nobody is talking about trying to change Medicare benefits,” President Obama stated during a July AARP teleconference. “What we want to do is to eliminate some of the waste that is being paid for out of the Medicare trust fund.” The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office figures that the House of Representatives version of the bill would trim Medicare spending by $500 billion across the next decade with no impact on Medicare benefits. AARP claims that “none of the health care reform proposals being considered by Congress would cut Medicare benefits or increase your out-of-pocket costs for Medicare services.” However, in an August 15 Republican Party radio address, Sen. Orrin Hatch contended that “hundreds of billions of dollars” will be cut from Medicare and used to “expand a financially-strapped Medicaid program and create another government-run plan.”3,4
President Obama at a town hall meeting in Belgrade, Montana on August 14, 2009.
Source: www.healthreform.gov
