Debate on the Senate healthcare reform plan will likely begin on Saturday, and much of it will center around money and people.
How much, and how many.
And those answers are hard to determine…
It’s a big billl…and the official cost of the Senate healthcare reform
package introduced this week is $848-billion over 10 years.
But that is a figure from the Congressional Budget Office that is issued with a nod and a wink.
It includes cuts in Medicare reimbursement that will never pass, and fudges the time frame by 4 years.
But CBO does say, medical costs would go up more if nothing were done, and the deficit would be higher.
The house bill covers 36 of the 45 million uninsured in America right now. The Senate version covers 31 million.
The CBO says though, that by 2019, around 24-million will remain uncovered…8 million of whom are illegal aliens and subsidies to low income earners could reach $194 billion a year by then.
Overall, the differences in the House and Senate versions aren’t huge, but critics say the biggest flaws are a failure to cover everyone, and a lack of any way to control medical cost inflation.
And that was supposed to be the point of the exercise.