Democrats Raid Medicare to Pay for Obamacare (Again!)
As Ronald Reagan would say, “There they go again.” A decade after Democrats raided Medicare by more than half a trillion dollars to fund Obamacare, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her Democratic colleagues recently introduced new Obamacare legislation that would raid Medicare by nearly another half-trillion dollars.
Sadly, the House plans to vote on this legislative package before the Independence Day holiday. Lowering spending in one unsustainable entitlement to fund another represents the height of fiscal irresponsibility. For Democrats, however, it looks like par for the course.
Obamacare on Steroids
Democrats have titled their bill the Obamacare “enhancement” act — and for good reason, because it would effectively put the law on quite the figurative steroids. The bill would stymie recent efforts by the Trump administration to offer more insurance options to consumers, such as short-term, limited-duration insurance and association health plans.
Instead, it would make skyrocketing premiums “affordable” by dedicating more taxpayer dollars towards Obamacare exchange subsidies, while also directing $10 billion per year to insurance companies via a new — and permanent — federal bailout fund.
The legislation would also balloon Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion to able-bodied Americans. It would require states to keep individuals on the rolls for 12 months, allowing affluent individuals to remain in this “low-income” program. The income cap on coverage for children would also be eliminated, permitting states to cover children of millionaires while receiving federal dollars for doing so if they choose.
At a time evidence already suggests significant waste and fraud takes place among individuals receiving Medicaid coverage, the Pelosi legislation would add to the ever-increasing budget woes of numerous states by forcing them to keep ineligible individuals on the rolls.
Socialist-Style Price Controls
How would Democrats fund all this new spending? From Medicare.
The Obamacare “enhancement” legislation includes drug pricing provisions that the House of Representatives passed last December. The provisions would require drug companies to “negotiate” prices with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which would effectively dictate prices to drug companies based on benchmarks laid out in the bill. Companies that do not “negotiate” would face excise taxes that could cause the manufacturer to lose money on every drug it sells in the United States.
The Congressional Budget Office confirmed back in December that these “negotiation” provisions would lead to the development of fewer drugs, as companies invest less in research and development. The CBO also said, however, that the blunt price controls would reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending. So Democrats used these price controls to fund their recent Obamacare expansion bill.
Raiding Medicare (Again)
According to CBO, the vast majority of the savings from drug pricing — a total of $448.2 billion over ten years, to be exact — used to fund the Obamacare bill comes from Medicare. That the Democrats are effectively raiding Medicare to expand entitlements for younger Americans makes the Obamacare “enhancement” legislation all the more odious and irresponsible, though, at this point, we really shouldn’t be surprised.
We’ve seen this act before. Indeed, the Obama administration spent years trying to justify the raid on Medicare. Kathleen Sebelius, then the HHS secretary, testified before Congress that provisions in the law would “both” extend Medicare’s solvency and pay for Obamacare. This is a position that defies both logic as well as common sense.
As it stands, Medicare has already become functionally insolvent. The year before Obamacare’s passage, the program’s trustees projected the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund would run out of money to pay all its bills in 2017 — three years ago. The Obamacare double-counting gimmicks that Sebelius testified about may appear to have extended the program’s solvency, but if only on paper. But the true cost of these things cannot remain hidden forever. According to current projections, even the funds from these phony solutions will run out by 2026.
Doing the Wrong Thing About Medicare’s Insolvency
Yet what would Pelosi and House Democrats do about Medicare’s looming insolvency? Not just nothing — worse than nothing. Rather than using the savings from their socialistic price controls to make Medicare solvent, they would take that money and throw it at health insurers to prop up Obamacare. As shocking as it may seem to some, this behavior echoes Pelosi’s 2011 interview with CNBC, when she bragged about how Democrats “took half a trillion dollars out of Medicare” to pay for Obamacare.
The Obamacare “enhancement” demonstrates how Pelosi and her fellow Democrats don’t care about fiscal responsibility or protecting America’s seniors. Instead, they view Medicare just as they did in 2010: A slush fund to raid on a whim as part of their effort to expand government-run health care at any cost.
This post was originally published at The Federalist.