How Obama's Reform Won't Control Spending

In an article entitled "An Expensive Health Care Agenda: Doing Math on the Obama Plan", Newsweek writer Robert Samuelson discusses how Obama's reform bill, H.R. 3200, will become financially stable. The short answer, it won't. Lewin Group, a consulting firm owned by one of the largest health care insurers, UnitedHealth Group, performed the study to analyse what exactly the reform bill will do to try and control the outrageous spending that is currently bring done on health care. There were three main things that the study concluded. Number one, the number of uninsured people in the United States will be reduced by half, from 49 million to 19.5 million. Number two, as a result, health care spending will rise from 17 percent of GDP to 28 percent of GDP. And finally, the budget deficit will continue to rise. It is predicted that from 2010-2019 the deficit will rise to 39 billion, and from 2019-2029 it will rise to almost 1 trillion dollars.
With this increase in spending and deficit, it is clear that this plan requires some money to assist it. It is predicted that over the next two decades about 1 trillion dollars of the approximated 4.6 trillion dollars worth of spending will be contributed by modest cutbacks to medicare and medicaid. However, the biggest source of funds will be a new tax on the wealthy which could generate about 1.7 trillion dollars. With this increased spending and deficit, it is only a matter of time before a new health care reform is required, one that will control the cost without hindering the service.

Article Posted at http://www.newsweek.com/id/215070/page/1