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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Tuesday, April 05, 2011
By Terence P. Jeffrey
(CNSNews.com) - The fiscal 2012 budget proposal unveiled today by House
Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) offers sweeping reforms in federal
spending, including defunding and repealing the health-care law signed last
year by President Barack Obama and converting the federal share of the
Medicaid program into block grants to state governments.
The Republican proposal says one of its aims is “making sure that not a
penny goes toward implementing the new [health care] law” enacted last year.
This includes repealing about $800 billion in new taxes that were built into
the law.
The proposed Republican budget resolution lists as one of its “key
objectives” that it “Repeals and defunds the President’s health care law,
advancing instead common-sense solutions focused on lowering costs,
expanding access and protecting the doctor-patient relationship.”
“There is no way for ‘experts’ in Washington to know more about the
health care needs of individual Americans than those individuals and their
doctors know,” says the proposal. “The new health-care law, rammed through
Congress last year on a partisan vote, has taken the nation one step closer
to this fully government-run system.
“The problems with this approach are already popping up all over the
country,” says the proposal. “Health care costs continue to escalate
relentlessly. The new law has aggravated the worst aspects of the U.S.
health care system, without fixing what was broken. The country needs to
move away from this centralized system, not towards it.
“This budget starts by repealing the costly new government-run health care
law, saving roughly $725 billion over ten years by repealing the new
exchange subsidies and making sure that not a penny goes toward implementing
the new law,” says the resolution. “Then, this budget goes further with
reforms that make government health-care programs more responsive to
consumer choice.”
On the health-care tax front, the resolution says: “The health-care law
enacted last year contained roughly $800 billion in new taxes and tax
increases--the result of dozens of changes to tax law that added complexity
and unfairness to the code.” The proposal calls for repealing all of these
new taxes and tax increases as part of repealing the entirety of the
Obamacare law.
One of the new health-care reforms proposed by the GOP budget is converting
the federal share of Medicaid—the federal-state program that provides
health insurance to low-income people—into block grants to state
governments.
The proposal says the GOP budget aims to: “Secure the Medicaid benefit by
converting the federal share of Medicaid spending into a block grant
tailored to meet each state’s needs, indexed for inflation and population
growth. This reform ends the misguided one-size-fits-all approach that has
tied the hands of so many state governments. States will no longer be
shackled by federally determined program requirements and enrollment
criteria. Instead, they will have the freedom and flexibility to tailor a
Medicaid program that fits the needs of their unique populations.”
The GOP budget proposal notes that, according to the Congressional Budget
Office, federal Medicaid spending would increase by $627 billion over the
next decade under Obamacare, which increases the number of people eligible
for the program. |
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