Medicare Actuary: Story Being Pushed By Republicans About Delayed Health Care Analysis Is False
Email“That story’s not true,” Richard Foster, the chief actuary for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told ABC News.
Foster was responding to a blog item in the conservative American Spectator, pushed to reporters by House Republican aides, claiming that Foster’s less-than-glowing analysis of the health care reform law – had “been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.”
The blog, written anonymously, goes on to quote an unnamed source – purportedly one who works at the Department of Health and Human Services, saying “the reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote. Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff. and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary's office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report."
Foster says the report is completely false.
“I have no idea how that rumor got started, but it’s completely unfounded,” he says.
Foster tells ABC News that he received a copy of the bill on March 18, and knew then that he wouldn’t be able to do a thorough analysis of it before the vote. He informed Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, about that fact in a letter on March 20.
“We could not have given anything to them the week before the bill was held,” as the Spectator item claimed, Foster said, because he didn’t receive the bill until March 18.
The House passed the Senate Democrats’ health care reform bill on Sunday night, March 21, as well as “fixes” to the bill.
Four days later, on March 25, Senate Democrats passed the fixes.
Foster’s analysis, which we covered last week, said that he thought the increased demand for health care reform services from so many new patients will tax “existing providers resources and could lead to price increases, cost-shifting, and/or changes in providers’ willingness to treat patients with low-reimbursement health coverage.” He also said that provisions in the law meant to get federal health spending into the black would be “outweighed by the increased costs” until beyond 2020.
-jpt
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Republicans lie about pretty much everything.
Posted by: MDC | April 27, 2010, 5:08 pm 5:08 pm
Well they are no worse than Democrats who also lie pretty much about everything.
Posted by: j011254 | April 27, 2010, 5:35 pm 5:35 pm
But surely they should have read the report before they voted on the bill?
The fact still remains that a report was commissioned, but a vote was shoved through without anyone reading the report…or the bill, for that matter.
Posted by: GloriaG | April 27, 2010, 5:37 pm 5:37 pm
“Foster tells ABC News that he received a copy of the bill on March 18, and knew then that he wouldn’t be able to do a thorough analysis of it before the vote. He informed Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, about that fact in a letter on March 20.” – ABC News
[sarcasm]
Gee, if only the ever caring hero of humanity Barack Obama knew about this before hand, I’m sure he would have delayed the vote a week or two.
[/sarcasm]
Posted by: Noz | April 27, 2010, 5:45 pm 5:45 pm
Just another lie to add to the long list by some Republicans on the subject of health care reform. Remember ‘death panels’?
GloriaG, why couldn’t your senator or congressperson read the bill? I read a lot of it on the internet. And they do have a lot of aides who read and summarize for them on other bills, don’t they?
Posted by: Lydia | April 27, 2010, 5:46 pm 5:46 pm
“Republicans lie about pretty much everything.”
Seriously, even Republican Congressman are embarrassed by the RNC’s deceptive census mailer fund raising letter.
Posted by: Ryan C | April 27, 2010, 6:44 pm 6:44 pm
“Story Being Pushed by Republicans… Is False”
Shouldn’t that just be a macro in all word processors by now?
Posted by: Ron | April 28, 2010, 12:04 am 12:04 am
“Foster says the report is completely false. ‘I have no idea how that rumor got started, but it’s completely unfounded,’ he says.”
Oh, is that right? And he and his boss expect Americans to believe them?
Way more than insurance companies, and way more than financial institutions, politicians and their appointed shills are in need of serious reforming. At the ballot box. Starting this fall.
Ramming through a bill before the truth can come out is SOP with these idiots, and they totally overlook that “small” point — on purpose, obviously.
Gee, and the demwits are “so surprised” that the report proves they passed a bill that doesn’t do what they claimed.
November. Elections. Dump the idiots.
Posted by: All Spun Out | April 28, 2010, 1:02 am 1:02 am
So the issue is not what Foster said, but when the report was available. Foster debunks the Democrats and the CBO. Adding to Obama’s fiscal disaster. Oh, sorry, that’s Bush’s fault.
Posted by: Bill | April 28, 2010, 8:36 am 8:36 am
The real story should still be that this bill, affecting every American and 1/6 of our economy, was pushed through WITHOUT having had this research available!
What was the urgency that prevented them from waiting a week or two for some numbers?
Posted by: WhyNot | April 28, 2010, 9:18 am 9:18 am
Ohhh! So even though Mr. Foster – along with EVERYONE ELSE IN AMERICA – knew, for at least a year, that these Leftists wanted to pass legislation that would saturate the health care market with 30 MILLION NEW PEOPLE, it was only after he received the bill that he could estimate that it could “tax existing providers resources and could lead to price increases, cost-shifting, and/or changes in providers’ willingness to treat patients with low-reimbursement health coverage.”
Wow! What a revelation! Who, oh who, could have guessed that if you add 30 million new patients with no increases in the number of doctors, that it would “tax existing providers resources”!
With geniuses like this at the helm, no wonder all of our entitlements are in such good financial condition!
Posted by: rvastar | April 28, 2010, 9:56 am 9:56 am
“He also said that provisions in the law meant to get federal health spending into the black would be ‘outweighed by the increased costs’ until beyond 2020.”
Shocker: ObamaCare increases health care costs faster than not passing it.
Posted by: Health Redistribution Czar | April 28, 2010, 11:13 am 11:13 am
… ‘course even if they didn’t sit on an existing report, it’s 95% as bad. They pushed the bill through before it could be properly analyzed.
Posted by: DRH | April 28, 2010, 11:23 am 11:23 am
All Spun Out, I don’t understand how you think voting out incumbents this fall will automatically get you better people. You actually could end up with much worse. There is no logic to ‘just vote them all out.’
Posted by: Lydia | April 28, 2010, 11:54 am 11:54 am
The bill is just fine. All the good it will do Americans and by extension, the economy will offset its costs. And the ten year look ahead shows it reducing out deficit.
Another way to look at it, if we had not passed this bill premiums would continue to be higher as more and more Americans wouldn’t be able to afford insurance, more bankruptcies due to medical bills as a result, thousands more Americans who couldn’t afford insurance would die each year and those Americans with pre-existing conditions would continue to be denied insurance.
We have to ‘take our medicine’ with this bill to help our economy, our future deficit and right now, the health of millions of Americans.
Posted by: Lydia | April 28, 2010, 12:02 pm 12:02 pm
turns out they were right about this health care bill. costs up, insurance plan choices reduced, and access to care constrained by the addition of 30 million moochers.
Posted by: charlie | October 15, 2010, 11:12 am 11:12 am