Quick Fact: Fox News advances falsehood that health bill will "bankrupt" country
On Fox News' America's Newsroom, anchor Patti Ann Browne allowed Citizens Against Government Waste's David Williams to falsely claim that the Senate health care bill is "going to bankrupt this country in a matter of years." Browne at no point noted that the Congressional Budget Office [CBO] reported that the Senate's health reform bill will reduce federal deficits by $130 billion through 2019.
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From the December 23 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom:
BROWNE: We need to be clear. For every winner, there's a loser. Some states are getting hundreds of millions, even billions in perks. Other states will have to pay for that. So while the deals are rewards for states that voted for the bill, is it also a punishment for those that voted against?
WILLIAMS: Oh, it's a big lump of coal in everyone's stockings because even if you're a state that's getting more money, well other states are getting more money, so you still have to pay for that. So, this really is not a good deal for anyone even though, on a local level, it might look like a good deal. This really is just a bust and it's really-it's going to bankrupt this country in a matter of years.
BROWNE: What would you say are the most egregious pork additions here?
FACT: CBO projected Senate health bill would reduce deficit
CBO: Bill yields "a net reduction in federal deficits of $132 billion" over 10 years. From CBO's December 19 cost estimate of the Senate bill incorporating the manager's amendment:
CBO and JCT estimate that, on balance, the direct spending and revenue effects of enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act incorporating the manager's amendment would yield a net reduction in federal deficits of $130 billion over the 2010-2019 period.
CBO expects bill to continue deficit reduction during decade after 2019. CBO also estimated on December 20 that the bill will continue to reduce the deficit beyond the 10-year budget window that ends in 2019 "with a total effect during that decade that is in a broad range between one-quarter percent and one-half percent of GDP."
Doing what the Republicans supported would bankrupt the country.
Any offering from the Dems will help turn the curve on healthcare spending.
Over the next decade, a certain amount of money is projected to be spent. According to the CBO, if this legislation passes, there will be about $132 billion LESS spent than if this legislation was not enacted. But even better, in the decade after that (the 2020s), the legislation will mean that between $650 billion and $1.3 trillion less will be spent than if we do nothing.
It is sort of like insulating your house, with massive reduction in costs. In my case, if it cost me $2500 to insulate my house, and the result was a 2/3 reduction in my energy bill, then I would be almost zero-sum the first year, and have the big energy reductions from then on.
Not that I'm at all a fan of this bill--it's the biggest steaming pile of corporate welfare in the history of this nation--but the whole idea of spending money to save even more money is so easy a caveman can--oh wait, we're talking about rratso here...
More money in benefits will not bring down costs. inevitable price controls might, but they present their own hazard.
Note it was an econ argument, not ethical
There are many things going on with this reform. One is a small tax increase on the wealthiest of Americans to gain enough money to help pay for the increase in covered Americans. The richest nation in the world shouldn't have as many millions of uninsured as we do, and in order to provide them coverage, we, as a nation, need to do whatever it takes - in this case, one of the things it takes is a small tax increase on those richest Americans.
Another thing to make this reform deficit neutral - that means it will cost us LESS money, not MORE, than the status quo would have - is that we got an agreement from multiple providers to lower their reimbursement rates - that's where much of the cost savings come from to pay for the increased coverages provided. They are also dropping much of the extra coverage that the Republicans pushed through on Medicare Advantage. That program provided minor benefits to patients and many profits to private insurers - those get cut, and so those extra costs go away, which helps pay for the added coverages!
Your "allegation" that more money equals reduced costs is ignorant, uneducated, almost satirical in its folly.
So when cost exceed benefits, then what? Price controls? or rationing?
2. Health care could never be in such a total mess if government had not been running health care for over 5 decades.
3. There are people who actually believe that government has not been running health care for several decades.
4. Fox station loves that fact that it is called a news network instead of a slant network...Fox Slant.
5. Any person or group of persons who disagree with the Glen Beck Slant Network are called idiots because they are old enough to remember Waco Texas, Jones town, Africa etc...
6. There are people who are not willing to think or see the similarities between Waco Texas and Glen Beck.
7. Idiots must be all of us folks who DO remember the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, and the first decade of 2000, and did not drown our ignorance in booze, drugs, etc.
8. Alcohol and Obesity, are a choice not a disease…thanks AMA and their associated lobby groups for blurring the line for huge profits…
9. Beck and his other drug addicts are only upset that the government is changing the WAY it runs health care, and is afraid that anyone might already know that our government HAS been running health care through its lobby groups for several decades.
10. There are people who believe we actually vote for representation…we vote only for lobby groups. The lobby groups that Beck and his other drug crazed friends represent, currently are not in as much power as they would like.
11. Money is power, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
12. If we want our country back, do any of us remember the word BOYCOTTE?
13. If we simply quit buying everything we don’t need, new watches, new cell phones, new TV’S, new garage door openers, new cars, new houses, new lawn mowers, etc…etc, we could own this country in 6 months and never a shot fired, or any need for any stupid talk of a revolution.
15. My daughter ate 5 slices of cheese pizza. She needed to take a crap. Her mother sent her to the emergency room, after all the tests and charges, the insurance company was billed 14,441.00….I gave her a bowl of grapes and sent her to school the next day. That was DURING President Chaney’s reign of health terror. That is lobby group health care at its finest moment, Why do the drug addicts of the 80’s feel the government is NOT been running health care?
14. I could go on for hours here, I was awake in the 80’s
Many have already proven that failure to curb the double digit heath care inflation rate of health care, will indeed bankrupt our nation, if nothing is done, and turn us into a non-functioning lower level nation. Even though most of the nations top economists agree with this fact, It does not take a math wizard to do this math.
2) more insured people will cause even higher inflation
2. More insured people will not cause greater increases in medical costs - there's no evidence of that, and without some work on controlling entitlement spending, which this bill does, the increases in medical spending were going to become obscene. The whole bill provides this benefit, yet you think you can single out one part and assign it responsibility it doesn't have.
3. Again you prove that you don't have a leg to stand on in any argument you participate in.
4. Whoever pays you should ask for your letter of resignation. You suck at being a paid troll.
Sure there is evidence that more people covered raises medical expenses. since the late sixties when insurance started to become common prices have soared and there are few situations where increasing demand while holding the supply steady leads to price decreases. If there were famine would be a good thing