From the diaries by Erick.

My full article is here at The Heritage Foundation’s blog.

A major new report confirms the worst fears of many: Health care reform will raise the costs for most Americans—by about 18% on average. That is on top of existing and expected inflation of health coverage.

This exposes President Obama’s fictitious claim that people will save money under his proposal.  Only those who receive new government subsidies and benefits will “save.”  The rest of us will pay–big-time.

Once the plan is fully phased-in (by 2019), a typical family of four would pay an extra $4,000 each year.

When combined with inflation, costs would rise from today’s $12,300 annual average to $25,900. Of that 111% increase, $9,600 is due to existing factors uncorrected by the legislation, and $4,000 due to additional costs created by the legislation.

For single persons, the differential is projected at $1,500 a year. Premiums would rise from today’s $4,600 a year to $9,600 overall.

Prepared by Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), the study was requested by AHIP—America’s Health Insurance Plans. It focuses on the leading plan pending in Congress, sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus (D, MT), which is scheduled for a Senate Finance Committee vote on Tuesday.

The PWC projections track what The Heritage Foundation and many others have said about the legislation: It does not save money. It simply taxes those who have health coverage and uses their money to give care to others.

The White House is said to be furious. After all, President Obama’s claims that he makes care more affordable are exposed as a myth by the new study.

Details and links are here.

Did you notice Barack Obama’s shifting strategy? It is no longer “health care reform” that Obama agitates for. It is “health insurance reform.”

There is a big difference according to polling. People recognize that American healthcare is really the best in the world, despite Obama’s best efforts to claim otherwise.

It is the insurance system that people don’t like or trust.

But now Obama opens himself up to a serious problem. According to Obama, he has “great health insurance, and so does every member of Congress”.

That begs the question — if we’re going to have a taxpayer funded health insurance program, why shouldn’t we just allow every American to get on the President’s and Congress’ healthcare plans?

No reform is needed. Just open up that plan to the American people. Offer it across state lines just like a Blue Cross-Blue Shield Plan.

Why not if it is such “great health insurance”? Instead, Obama proposes a different system for the American people — one not nearly as good as what Congress and the President get.

And the kicker is neither Obama and the Congress want to give up their “great health insurance” for the “hoi polloi plan”.

The Orwellianly-titled American Health Choices Act, a health care overhaul bill the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee passed Tuesday with a 13-10 party line vote, contains a two-pronged mechanism for increasing government’s already enormous footprint within the health care market, and for driving private insurance into the ground.

When the first public draft of the American Health Choices Act (AHCA) was released at the beginning of June, it contained language mandating that employers with 25 or more workers offer health insurance to their employees or face a federal fine. The level of that fine, as with almost every other penalty and tax increase provided for in the bill, was to be left to the discretion of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This new ability to impose taxes and levy fines of an amount entirely at her discretion would be a breathtaking expansion of the appointed HHS Secretary’s power.

When an evaluation by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the AHCA’s net cost – that which would have to be spent above built-in revenue increases and offsets – to be around $1.6 trillion (a number that many experts and outside evaluators find to be reminiscent of the Medicare forecasts at its inception, which put the cost of the now-$37 trillion program at less than $10 million), while only extending health coverage to approximately a third of the 45 million American uninsured, public backlash was significant enough that the HELP committee members writing the bill took steps to bring that projected cost down from a trillion and a half dollars into the hundreds-of-billions range.

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