President Obama’s contested health care overhaul will become a larger target in the wake of a bitter and protracted debt ceiling debate as a major cause of the nation’s exploding debt, analysts say. Amid wrangling over raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, Obama has rebuffed efforts to scale back his health care overhaul, taking a hard line that has left large potential savings untapped, some say.
Analysts argue that any serious plan to bring down the deficit must address mounting health care costs, something lacking in both GOP and Democratic proposals.
“Despite his assurances, Obamacare doesn’t bend [downward] the cost curve at all,” said Kathryn Nix, a health care policy analyst at the conservative Heritage
Foundation. “It’s going to blow up costs. So, no, we can’t take this off the table in the debt debate.”
In fact, health care spending will account for one-fifth of the U.S. gross domestic product by the end of the decade, according to a new report from federal auditors.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services projected that health care spending would grow 5.8 percent each year under Obama’s watch, slightly more than if his legislation were never enacted.
Republicans say those findings undermine Obama’s claims that forcing Americans to purchase health insurance by 2014 would slow towering medical costs. They argue that Obama’s trillion-dollar health care plan, coupled with his $787 billion stimulus package, intensified already bloated government spending.
And the American public remains skeptical about so-called Obamacare.
According to the latest Rasmussen poll of likely voters, 57 percent of respondents favor repeal of the president’s health care initiative.
However, some analysts said the growing cost of health care has less to do with Obama’s blueprint than soaring entitlement payments owed to an aging population.
“If you repeal Obama’s health care legislation, it would not improve the deficit,” said Bob Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonprofit group focused on federal deficit reduction. “It’s not as though that is why we have a spending problem. It’s much larger. Health care has to be on the table regardless and separate from Obama’s [overhaul].”
In 2014, the first year the government provides subsidies for private insurance and additional Medicaid payments, health care spending will jump by 8.3 percent, according to the CMS report.
The White House counters that the administration is expanding health coverage for millions of Americans while not significantly increasing the price of medical care.
“The bottom line is that more Americans will get coverage and save money, and health expenditure growth will remain virtually the same,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Nancy-Ann Deparle.
Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, attempted to push through a $4 trillion “grand bargain” over the next decade, including cuts to entitlement programs. But that plan was effectively killed when Boehner walked away, citing concerns over White House demands for higher taxes.
