Obamacare

I have received a message from an associate on the subject of Obamacare. It was originally addressed by my associate to his children and grandchildren. Since it is written better than I could have written, here it is in its entirety:

"It is election season and the media are filled with information about Medicare and Obamacare.  Much of that informations is either  a distortion or only a partial statement of the facts.  Most of you were not paying attention to the Congress and Obama in the early years of his  administration.  I was.  Here are some facts:

1.  With the Democrats holding both Houses of Congress sand Obama as president, Obama spent nearly the first two years of his administration promoting Obamacare.  The Democrat Congress used every procedural avenue to craft and pass Obamacare.  It passed without a single Republican vote.

2. In order to secure many Democrat Senator's vote, the law included what were essentially bribes. The prominent ones were given to Senators from Louisiana, Nebraska and Florida but almost every Democrat Senator got something.  As Harry Reid famously said: "If your Senator has not participated in drafting this legislation, he is not doing his job".  The final bill is about 2500 pages.  Most telling, the Congress exempted themselves and their staffs from the provisions of Obamacare.

3.  One of Obama's selling points was that Obamacare would be "revenue neutral".  In order to achieve that promise, Obama and the Congress took two significant steps: first, they transferred $500 Billion from Medicare to help pay for Obamacare; second, they rigged the assumptions that the CBO was to follow in analyzing the cost of Obamacare: the analysis was limited to ten subsequent years and the taxes were applied in the first years and the costs were delayed until later years.  Voila! Revenue neutrality was achieved.

4.  It is significant that subsequent CBO analyses freed of those confining assumptions has forecast major cost increases assigned to Obamacare.  It is not "revenue neutral".

5. Obama is now defending the transfer of money from Medicare to pay for Obamacare by saying he was merely transferring the "savings" that he hoped to achieve by eliminating fraud and abuse. If you follow that logic, you are far more mentally agile than I. By the way, IBM offered to help find fraud and abuse in Medicare and Obama turned them down.  Little has been done to eliminate fraud and abuse which are rampant."