×
All bets are off asks, "Whatever healthcare reform liberals propose, the knee-jerk conservative response will be that it breaks the budget. So: Cost out a meaningful healthcare program, and see how revenue-neutral you can make it through elimination of corporate welfare, expiration of Bush tax cuts and/or budget tradeoffs."Budgetary analysis is a bit beyond my capabilities. Luckily, the Congressional Budget Office does this sort of thing for a living. And they put the Wyden-Bennett Healthy Americans Act (assuming the plan would start in 2012) under their modeling microscope last May:
Overall, our preliminary analysis indicates that the proposal would be roughly budget-neutral in 2014. That is, our analysis suggests that your proposal would be essentially self-financing in the first year that it was fully implemented. That net result reflects large gross changes in federal revenues and outlays that would roughly offset each other.[...]For the years after 2014, we anticipate that the fiscal impact would improve gradually, so that the proposal would tend to become more than self-financing and thereby would reduce future budget deficits or increase future surpluses.So without futzing with the Bush tax cuts or government waste or corporate welfare, the Wyden-Bennett plan is revenue neutral in its second year of operation, and then begins to save the government money, and improve our fiscal outlook, in every year after that. Our health care system is so wasteful, so inefficient, so illogical, that it would actually be very hard to redesign it such that it substantially harmed the budget. But it would be perfectly easy to simply build upon it such that we spend more money. So when you're dealing with cost, the question is really whether the proposal you're looking at redesigns, or merely subsidizes. Any reform that integrates the system a bit, that smooths over some of the fractures and works towards a single structure where better decisions can be incentivized and meaningful cost controls put into place, will save us money. Reforms that simply pay insurers to insure people probably won't. For more on the cost controls of different plans, see this article.
