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What Will ObamaCare Really Do? Raise Costs and Cost Jobs. Ask Caterpillar Inc. ObamaCare will Cost Them $100M In First Year!

March 19, 2010 Leave a comment

ObamaCareSymbol Obama once used Caterpillar as an example of a company that would benefit from stimulus money.  Of course he was lying and Caterpillar called him out on it.

Now the are calling him out on the wonders of ObamaCare.

Dow Jones Newswires | Caterpillar Inc. said the health-care overhaul legislation being considered by the U.S. House would increase the company’s health-care costs by more than $100 million in the first year alone.

In a letter Thursday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio, Caterpillar urged lawmakers to vote against the plan "because of the substantial cost burdens it would place on our shareholders, employees and retirees."

Caterpillar, the world’s largest construction machinery manufacturer by sales, said it’s particularly opposed to provisions in the bill that would expand Medicare taxes and mandate insurance coverage. The legislation would require nearly all companies to provide health insurance for their employees or face large fines.

The Peoria-based company said these provisions would increase its insurance costs by at least 20 percent, or more than $100 million, just in the first year of the health-care overhaul program.

"We can ill-afford cost increases that place us at a disadvantage versus our global competitors," said the letter signed by Gregory Folley, vice president and chief human resources officer of Caterpillar. "We are disappointed that efforts at reform have not addressed the cost concerns we’ve raised throughout the year.

Caterpillar: Health care bill would cost it $100M – Chicago Breaking Business

CBO: Obamacare Would Cost Over $2 Trillion.

March 19, 2010 Leave a comment

Oh wonderful…

The CBO’s most recent analysis is out, and it’s not likely to convince wavering House Democrats to jump to the Obamacare side of the fence.  Even the Democrats are granting that the latest version of their proposed health care overhaul would cost $69 billion more than the previous version.  According to the CBO, this version would siphon even more money out of Medicare, make even further cuts to Medicare Advantage, and levy even higher taxes and fines on the American people.

President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and their allies, are cheerfully citing “ten year” costs of $940,000,000,000.00 — apparently believing this to be a far more palatable figure than $1 trillion.  But even this colossal tally is like the introductory price quoted by a cell phone provider.  It’s the price before you pay for minutes, fees, and overcharges — and before the price balloons after the introductory offer expires.

For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs.  First, it includes 2010 as the initial year.  As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time.  Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009.  But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare.  If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.

But even that wouldn’t come close to reflecting the bill’s true costs.  The CBO projects that over the next four years, less than two percent of the bill’s alleged “ten year” costs would hit:  just $17 billion of the $940 billion in costs that the Democrats are claiming.  In fact, the costs through President Obama’s entire presidency, should he be reelected, would be $336 billion.  What would the president leave behind for his successor?  According to the CBO, he would leave behind costs of $837 billion during his successor’s first term alone.  If his successor were to serve a second term, he or she would inherit a cool $2.0 trillion in Obamacare costs — about six times its costs during Obama’s own tenure.  This legislation is a ticking time-bomb.

To see the bill’s true first-decade costs, we need to start the clock when the costs would actually start in any meaningful way: in 2014.  The CBO says that Obamacare would cost $2.0 trillion in the bill’s real first decade (from 2014 to 2023) — and much more in the decades to come.

CBO: Obamacare Would Cost Over $2 Trillion | The Weekly Standard

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