Ryan's proposal -
In addition to acknowledging that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs, the CBO finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.
Under the so-called "extended baseline scenario" -- a.k.a. projections based on current law -- debt held by the public will grow to 67 percent of GDP by 2022. Under the GOP plan, public debt would reach 70 percent of GDP in the same window.
Even though this isn't a review of the full legislative language, since that hasn't been provided to the CBO yet, the indications are still clear and for the math challenged -
ie, we're 3% better off doing nothing than Ryan's plan.
It's a PDF file which you can find online.
The big elephant in the room here is CBO, in that they are assuming that the scheduled Medicare reimbursement drops WILL occur every year. Of course, we know that they will not, and have not occured since the law was put into place in, I believe, 1997.
The HCR bill, and "doing nothing" also assumes that those reimbursement drops will occur - but we know that they won't. That assumption has a huge impact.
I'm pretty sure Ryan's bill doesn't make that same assumption - since it uses a block grant approach. This seems to be a much more realistic outlook - not assuming these drops will occur.
That was my biggest issue with CBO's analysis of the HC bill - they were required, since they weren't allowed to assume that Doc Fix would be ongoing, to assume a 20% drop in Medicare Doc reimbursements - which everyone knew would never happen. But that is how they scored it, so the projection numbers are a fallacy. I'm surprised that the CBO is not allowed to think for themselves, and do a realistic projection, instead of being forced to put in assumptions that it knows has no chance in reality of occurring. Must be very frustrating to work there - knowing that your work is being relied on, and yet knowing that it is flat out wrong.
