Average price of ground beef per pound hit its all-time high

The government and news media claim inflation is under control and low. Unfortunately, you don't buy all the items they track to make the misleading pronouncement. I do most of the grocery shopping in my family and the price of beef, bacon and other staples is shocking. My electric bill has skyrocketed in the last 4 years due in large part to Obama and the global warming crowd imposing regulations. Health insurance is rapidly rising and companies are shifting costs to employees. My company has shifted $1000 in health care cost to me in the last two years. They are afraid of the 2018 tax on alleged high-end, so-called, Cadillac plans. I don't have a high-end plan. Medical cost inflation is pushing ordinary plans into the special tax bracket. The Cadillac plan threshold was indexed to inflation; not heath insurance inflation. Obamacare was supposed to control health cost inflation, but it hasn't happened. Companies have discovered the Cadillac tax will be a Chevy tax by 2018 and they aren't planning on paying it. Can you blame them? It's 25%. Also, don't forget gas was $1.80 a gallon when Obama took office in January 2009. Ordinary middle-class Americans are really struggling because wages have been stagnant and real household income has declined under Obama. Thanks, President Obama.

(CNSNews.com) – The average price for all types of ground beef per pound hit its all-time high -- $3.884 per pound -- in the United States in July, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
That was up from $3.880 per pound in June. A year ago, in July 2013, the average price for a pound of ground beef was $3.459 per pound. Since then, the average price for a pound of ground beef has gone up 42.1 cents--or about 12 percent.

Congressman asks insurance company leaders if #Obamacare will lower premiums...Crickets...

Major Insurance Companies Agree: ObamaCare Won't Reduce Premiums By $2500 Like Obama Promised

Obama's HHS spending $7 billion to find ways to save money on Obamacare

Only in a weird liberal alternate universe is it a good idea to spend billions to study how to save money.

Via Weekly Standard:

The Department of Health and Human Services revealed on Wednesday a plan to spend up to $7 billion to find ways to reduce spending under the Affordable Care Act while maintaining or improving the quality of health care.  The solicitation for bids for this wide-ranging project appeared today on the Federal Business Opportunities website:
“The purpose is to develop a Research, Measurement, Assessment, Design, and Analysis (RMADA) IDIQ [Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity] to respond to expanded needs of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care ACT (ACA) and Health Care reform ACT (HCERA). The work awarded under the RMADA will involve the design, implementation and evaluation of a broad range of research and/or payment and service delivery models to test their potential for reducing expenditures for Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and uninsured beneficiaries while maintaining or improving quality of care.”
Keep on reading…

CBO: Obamacare will cost $1.4 Trillion over next 10 years

The budget gimmick years, where there are taxes but not large costs, are dropping off the CBO analysis of Obamacare. Now, Americans ca see the true costs.

(American Spectator) — Repealing the new national health care law would result in gross savings of $1.4 trillion, a new report by the Congressional Budget Office finds.

During the health care debate, Democrats were hard pressed to keep up with President Obama’s promise that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion.” So they employed the gimmick of delaying the major spending provisions until 2014 to make the legislation appear cheaper within the CBO’s ten-year budget window, then 2010 through 2019. At the time, I calculated that this tactic deferred 98 percent of the spending to the last six years of that period. Well, now two years have passed, and the CBO’s budget window has shifted to 2012 through 2021 — and volià — the estimate that was $940 billion at the time of passage has suddenly gone up to $1.4 trillion. Read more here.

Liberal group brags CBO missed Obamacare subsidy by 578% and will cost taxpayers $110 billion a year in 2014

January 25, 2007 Obama speaks to Families USA Conference, Washington, DC

The liberal health care reform advocacy group, Families USA, commissioned a study of how many Americans will be eligible for subsidies under Obamacare. The study found 28.6 million Americans will be eligible in 2014. The CBO had estimated the number to be only 7 million. The cost difference is $91 billion a year. If this is accurate, Obamacare will cause the deficit to rise as early as 2015.

Verum Serum reported:

A new study by the Lewin Group estimates that 28.6 million Americans will be eligible for a federal subsidy to purchase health insurance beginning in 2014 at a projected cost to tax payers in excess of $110 billion. This estimate is dramatically higher (578%) than the cost of these subsidies forecast by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) prior to the bill’s enactment into law.

Instead of hanging their head in shame for helping sell the American taxpayers a lie, Families USA bragged about it in a press release.

Beginning in 2014, almost 29 million middle-income Americans will be eligible for new tax credits to help them afford private health insurance premiums. The historic tax cut in the health reform law, which is estimated to reduce family income taxes by more than $110 billion in 2014 alone, will be provided through tax credits to offset a significant portion of private insurance premium costs.

It has begun: Connecticut approves 22% health insurance rate hike to cover costs of Obamacare

But...but...President Obama promised his health care reform bill would lower health care insurance costs.

From BarackObama.com (small pdf):

OBAMA-BIDEN PLAN TO PROVIDE AFFORDABLE, ACCESSIBLE HEALTH CARE TO ALL

Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s plan strengthens employer–based coverage, makes insurance companies accountable and ensures patient choice of doctor and care without government interference. Under the plan, if you like your current health insurance, nothing changes, except your costs will go down by as much as $2,500 per year. If you don’t have health insurance, you will have a choice of new, affordable health insurance options. (emphasis mine)

Here is the actual truth about the effect of Obamacare on health insurance premiums.

The Hartford Courant reported:

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Connecticut requested a wide range of premium increases, which will take effect Oct. 1, to cover the costs of new benefits required by federal health reform. Higher prices mostly affect new members shopping for a health plan on the individual market rather than people who have group plans through an employer or some other organization.

The Connecticut Department of Insurance approved Anthem’s request without changes, including a boost of as much as 22.9 percent just to comply with one provision: eliminating annual spending limits per customer... (emphasis mine) Read more here.

CBO Says Oops! Obamacare To Cost $115 billion More Than Thought

There goes the alleged reduction in national debt. Most Americans were too smart to believe that anyway.
ABC News reported:

The director of the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the health care reform legislation would cost, over the next ten years, $115 billion more than previously thought, bringing the total cost to more than $1 trillion.

The revised figure is due to estimated costs to federal agencies to implement the new health care reform bill...

CBO had originally estimated that the health care reform bill would result in a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion from 2010-2019; this revised number would eliminate most of that savings.

NYT Admits Obamacare Will Drive Up Costs

Of course, the bill is signed into law now. Obamacre is going to create the same “adverse selection death spiral” New York insurance law has.

From the NYT:

Healthy people, in effect, began to subsidize people who needed more health care. The healthier customers soon discovered that the high premiums were not worth it and dropped out of the plans. The pool of insured people shrank to the point where many of them had high health care needs. Without healthier people to spread the risk, their premiums skyrocketed, a phenomenon known in the trade as the “adverse selection death spiral.”

A hint of things to come: Consumers game Massachusetts health law

Healthy consumers in Massachusetts are paying the penalty until they need expensive treatment. Then, they sign up for insurance under Massachusetts law. After they get the bills paid, they drop coverage again. This will occur on a massive national scale after Obamacare fully phases in to law.

The Boston Globe reported:

Thousands of consumers are gaming Massachusetts’ 2006 health insurance law by buying insurance when they need to cover pricey medical care, such as fertility treatments and knee surgery, and then swiftly dropping coverage, a practice that insurance executives say is driving up costs for other people and small businesses.

CBO: Obamacare will force families to buy insurance costing at least $12,000 per year

Ouch! That is going to hurt. Some people will receive subsidies, but they phase out at 4 times the poverty level.

If Congress passes the Senate health-care plan, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, American families will be required by federal law to buy a federally approved health insurance plan that will cost a minimum of $12,000 per year--and, on average, will cost $15,000 per year -- whether their employer or the government helps them with the premium or not. ...

...According to the CBO analysis, the insurance plans the Senate bill would require families to purchase would cost an average of $15,200 per year in 2016.

Is Socialist Health Care Holding Down Costs in Massachusetts?

No. Massachusetts has 97% coverage and many of the changes democrats are seeking in their health care bill, but Massachusetts insurers have asked for increases of 8 to 32 percent, starting April 1.

The insurers have asked for increases of 8 to 32 percent, starting April 1.

Last month, Patrick said the state Division of Insurance would review rate increases higher than 4.8 percent as part of a broader effort to control health care expenses.

The Boston Globe reports that if the state rejects the increases, it would be the first time Massachusetts has capped health insurance rates.

Oh my! Final Senate Obamacare Bill to Cost $2.5 trillion in First Real 10 Years.

According to the latest CBO report on the final Senate bill, this legislation will cost taxpaying Americans $1 trillion in new taxes over ten years and another trillion will be siphoned out of Medicare. The deficit will still rise by an additional $200 billion.

From the Weekly Standard:

... Rather, the CBO says that $871 billion would be the costs from 2010 to 2019 for expansions in insurance coverage alone.But less than 2 percent of those "10-year costs" would kick in before the fifth year of that span. In its real first 10 years (2014 to 2023), the CBO says that the bill would cost $1.8 trillion -- for insurance coverage expansions alone. Other parts of the bill would cost approximately $700 billion more, bringing the bill's full 10-year tab to approximately $2.5 trillion -- according to the CBO...

Debunking Obamacare Cost savings

Democrats claim there will be a cost savings under Obamacare because people will use the emergency room less. They claim the uninsured go to the emergency room more often because they can't afford a primary care physician. Is this true? A recent PriceWaterhouse Coopers survey does not support that claim. They found Medicaid patients use the emergency room twice as much as the uninsured do. Also, Massachusetts, which has a "universal coverage" mandate, has one of the highest ER visit rates in the country. The Democrats plan to shove more people into Medicaid may dramatically increase ER visits and costs.

From the NY Post:

ERs are indeed dangerously overcrowded; having worked in a busy city ER for more than a decade, I can tell you that the "extra" patients interfere seriously with basic care. But the solution doesn't involve giving more people insurance coverage -- it requires turning more people into wise consumers.

A recent PriceWaterhouse Coopers survey found that half of patients who visited US emergency rooms over the last year did so unnecessarily....

Are insurance companies really to blame for high medical costs?

Democrats like to blame the health insurance industry for the high cost of health care. According to Nancy Pelosi,

"They are the villains in this," Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters. She labeled industry practices as "immoral."

The truth is insurers are actually holding down costs. Most insurance companies send a statement to clients after they use health care services. Check your statement and you will see the insurance company is getting a 40% to 50% discount for services. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study of 2008 costs indicates 87% of insurance premiums go to pay for health care services. Only 3% are insurance company profits.


Click image for larger view

Considering the bureaucracy and inefficiency of the Federal Government, the waste from a public option would likely be far in excess of 3%. Other proposed changes, such as eliminating preexisting conditions, will dramatically drive up costs to insurers.

CBO torpedoes ObamaCare again

President Obama and Democrats claim there will be health care savings by the mandated preventative procedures in their health care reform bill. They have chastised and demonized insurance companies for not providing universal coverage for these procedures. Insurance companies are businesses. If these procedures saved money, insurance companies would gladly cover them as a "smart business decision." The reason these medical procedures aren't always covered is they actually cost more money. Congressman Nathan Deal, ranking member on the Subcommittee on Health,Committee on Energy and Commerce asked the CBO about these "alleged" cost savings. He got this response (PDF).

Preventive medical care includes services such as cancer screening, cholesterol management, and vaccines. In making its estimates of the budgetary effects of expanded governmental support for preventive care, CBO takes into account any estimated savings that would result from greater use of such care as well as the estimated costs of that additional care. Although different types of preventive care have different effects on spending, the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.

The CBO may have underestimated the cost of health reform by $1 trillion

Dr. Stephen Parente of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management says that the CBO used outdated models to determine short- and long-term costs of the health care reform bills before Congress. The Democratic bills currently under consideration in the House and Senate would cost $2.1 trillion and $2.4 trillion, respectively.

Dr. Stephen Parente of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management says that the CBO used outdated models to determine short- and long-term costs of the Democrats health care reform plans. By his analysis, the bills currently under consideration in the House and Senate would cost $2.1 trillion and $2.4 trillion, respectively.

The biggest player in the health-care debate right now isn’t Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or even President Obama. It’s the Congressional Budget Office, which is responsible for estimating the costs of proposed legislation. After the director of the CBO testified on July 16 that none of the health-reform bills in the House or Senate would reduce the rate of increase in federal spending on health care, congressional efforts fell into disarray. Many policymakers began searching for a way to get costs below the CBO’s frightening estimate of $1.1 trillion over ten years. Others attacked the CBO, calling its estimates irresponsible.

The CBO is actually being kind to the would-be reformers. Its analysis likely understates—by at least $1 trillion—the true costs of expanding health coverage as current Democratic legislation contemplates. Over the last few months, my colleagues and I at the consulting firm Health Systems Innovations have provided cost estimates of health-care reform to both Republican and Democratic members of Congress, and we’ve posted these estimates on our website as well. We believe that the Democratic bills currently under consideration in the House and Senate would cost $2.1 trillion and $2.4 trillion, respectively—much higher than CBO’s figures.

The discrepancies between our estimates and CBO’s stem from our different assumptions about a key issue. The Democratic plans envision a government-run insurance program, modeled after Medicare, that will compete with private insurers. How many people would opt for coverage under this public insurance? We believe that both large and small employers would have powerful incentives to shift their employees out of private coverage and into the public plan. Like the Urban Institute, we estimate that roughly 40 million people would make the shift. CBO seems to assume, however, that large employers would use the public plan only sparingly and that only 11 million people would move from private to public insurance—which would, of course, result in lower costs.

How good are Congressional Democrats at estimating health care costs? Take a look at the original projections of the cost of Medicare.

The cost of Medicare is a good place to begin. At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly "conservative" estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.

If the Democrats pass ObamaCare and miss the projections as bad as they did in the 1966, America will be bankrupted.

CBO: Democrats Health Care Plan Will Raise Costs

Democrats and President Obama have been pitching health care reform as a long term cost savings. The nonpartisan CBO pulled that rug out from under them today.

From The Note:

Answering questions from Democrat Kent Conrad of North Dakota at a hearing of the Senate Budget Committee today, Elmendorf said CBO does not see health care cost savings in either of the partisan Democratic bills currently in Congress.

Conrad: Dr. Elmendorf, I am going to really put you on the spot because we are in the middle of this health care debate, but it is critically important that we get this right. Everyone has said, virtually everyone, that bending the cost curve over time is critically important and one of the key goals of this entire effort. From what you have seen from the products of the committees that have reported, do you see a successful effort being mounted to bend the long-term cost curve?

Elmendorf: No, Mr. Chairman. In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs…

As we wrote in our letter to you and Senator Gregg, the creation of a new subsidy for health insurance, which is a critical part of expanding health insurance coverage in our judgement, would by itself increase the federal responsibility for health care that raises federal spending on health care. It raises the amount of activity that is growing at this unsustainable rate and to offset that there has to be very substantial reductions in other parts of the federal commitment to health care, either on the tax revenue side through changes in the tax exclusion or on the spending side through reforms in Medicare and Medicaid. Certainly reforms of that sort are included in some of the packages, and we are still analyzing the reforms in the House package. Legislation was only released as you know two days ago. But changes we have looked at so far do not represent the fundamental change on the order of magnitude that would be necessary to offset the direct increase in federal health costs from the insurance coverage proposals.