Reply #27: One has to distinguish between

[Igel]

the health care reform bill and health care reform as a goal. They are different. I don't know what you mean by "HCR law."

Take the student loan bill. It saved money by restructuring student loan administration. But the student loan bill didn't show any real savings, even though it did produce hefty savings.

That's because all the net savings in the HCR bill were student loan savings--at least the HCR "savings" and the student loan savings were about the same amount. Had the student loan bill subsequently failed to pass, the HCR bill would have retroactively gone from saving money to being about revenue neutral. Take out other "savings" scavenged from elsewhere and you get a net loss on the HCR bill. This is a common game: You make a bill revenue-neutral by incorporating savings from all over the place to make the *goal* of the bill sound revenue-neutral when it's not.

The CBO rates bills. It means that the Medicare buy-out bill that passed a few weeks after the HCR bill wasn't included in the Medicare costs, and would more than gobbled up the HCR bill savings. Again, it was a different bill. Therefore it got a different rating, but it's a health-care (reform) expense.

The problem is that the press and administration made it sound like health care reform would save money by reducing Medicaid, Medicare costs, by reducing prescription costs and doctors' fees, by decreasing the overall cost of insurance by increasing the subscription pool. That this "bending the cost curve down" was all it took. But balancing the HCR bill's budget required a bailout from a lot of different sources and putting a few large expenses "off budget".