So, I'm watching the news the other night and they're talking about how the Obamacare folks have gotten serious about financial issues surrounding the bill. WTF? Excited, I gotta check this out. So, a couple of days later... I'm on the internet tonight reading about it.

Apparently, the main cost savings are an excise tax on cadillac health plans (which I kind of support), and jacking Medicare benefits away from old people. Obama bought off the AARP because the type of insurance plans that they make money off of will be where seniors go for replacements of their benefits that are being cut from Medicare. Here's a silly little video of a bunch of old fucks mutineering at a local AARP meeting, threatening to cancel their memberships: Click

The way the Obamacare people've gotten "serious" about financial issues, is all kinds of little tweaks and gotchas in the system. They lower payments to health care providers through the government health insurance plans, they tax prescription drug makers $20 billion here, they tax medical device manufacturers $38.6 billion there, oh, and there's some "second" excise tax on insurance companies also. A lot of stuff here and there like that.

And, in the end, you get a health care system that's supposed to save the federal government $16 billion over the next ten years.

The only thing is with all the tweaks and manipulations, the system they've set up only looks more and more complicated, with more and more points of failure where things can go the way you don't expect them. But, I guess that's why the bill was 1,200 pages to begin with. In an attempt to prove government's fine-tuned efficiency in specifically targetting what's wrong with markets.

Here's a good report on the finances of the latest incarnation of Obamacare if you're as sick as me wanna dig through it. It is only 3 pages long: Click

I really don't get the genius behind slashing the popular program, Medicare, and throwing cash into the hated program, Medicaid, they got going on. But, who said it had to make sense?

Really ticked that they didn't go with the simpler Healthy Americans Act that didn't have all these twists and gotchas.

Oh, and my favorite from that report. The big complaint that Bill Clinton's running around with about our medical system is we spend so much higher a percent of our comparatively larger GDP on health care and don't get better care than other nations. But, national health care expenditures don't even go down under this plan, they go up. From that report I linked to above:

Quote:

The increase in national health spending would be $114.2 billion over the 2010 through 2019 period and $527.4 billion over the 2020 through 2029 period.



They do have in there that if your family is already insured that your household should save a few hundred bucks a year. So, good for me! If the plan works...