States Forced To Pay For ObamaCare

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So this is how Obama will move the shells around in his massive shell game…..force the states to pay for it all:

Democrats want to use Medicaid to cover everyone up to at least 133% of the federal poverty level, or about $30,000 for a family of four. Starting in 2014, Mr. Baucus plans to spend $287 billion through 2019—or about one-third of ObamaCare’s total spending—to add some 11 million new people to the Medicaid rolls.

About 59 million people are on Medicaid today—which means that a decade from now about a quarter of the total population would be on a program originally sold as help for low-income women, children and the disabled. State budgets would explode—by $37 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office—because they would no longer be allowed to set eligibility in line with their own decisions about taxes and spending. This is the mother—and father and crazy uncle—of unfunded mandates.

This burden would arrive on the heels of an unprecedented state fiscal crisis. As of this month, some 48 states had shortfalls in their 2010 budgets totaling $168 billion—or 24% of total state budgets. The left-wing Center for Budget and Policy Priorities expects total state deficits in 2011 to rise to $180 billion. And this is counting the $87 billion Medicaid bailout in this year’s stimulus bill.

While falling revenues are in part to blame, Medicaid is a main culprit, even before caseloads began to surge as joblessness rose. The National Association of State Budget Officers notes that Medicaid spending is on average the second largest component in state budgets at 20.7%—exceeded only slightly by K-12 education (20.9%) and blowing out state universities (10.3%), transportation (8.1%) and prisons (3.4%).

Of course Obama’s plan has a bribe in place to shut the states up for a bit:

Mr. Baucus hopes to use his printing press to bribe the governors, at least for a time. Currently, the federal government pays about 57 cents out of every dollar the states spend on Medicaid, though the “matching rate” ranges as high as 76% in some states. That would rise to 95%—but only for five years. After that, who knows? It all depends on which budget Congress ends up ruining. Either the states will be slammed, or Washington will extend these extra payments into perpetuity—despite the fact that CBO expects purely federal spending on Medicaid to consume 5% of GDP by 2035 under current law.

But what it all comes down to is we all will be paying out the behind for subpar socialized health care. Could be at the state level or the federal level. Either way, we pay.

You know what would be a novel idea? How about lowering our taxes, so we have more money in our pocket, and that way we could spend our money on our insurance. How about allowing the companies to compete across state lines? Tort reform? Allowing small companies to group together to get better rates?

I know….crazy.

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Curt: How about lowering our taxes, so we have more money in our pocket, and that way we could spend our money on our insurance.

How about if we actually paid enough taxes to cover what our government actually spends, with or without any health program.

Curt: How about they stop spending so much damn money so they don’t tax people to death

oh? like that money we poured into Iraq? Easy to attack “taxes” while supporting policies that blew hundreds of billions of dollars. And oh, what about those “tax cuts” that actually drove up the deficit? (and the lie that it was responsible that it helped the economy, we know now that it was a total illusion of funny money).

Curt: Those tax cuts brought us a vibrant economy.

That is not true Curt, those were the beginning of the end of our economic freedom. We sold our country to China during the Bush years, and continue to sell it to China now. We could not have run up the national debt without the exchange with China. You call it BDS, I call it wasting money and not keeping a balanced budget. I would say Countrywide (and the other ilk – the mortgage brokers) stimulated the economy as much as those tax cuts and were part and parcel of the whole fleecing of America.

@Blast:

Heh.

Seeing an Obie supporter rail against gov’t spending has my irony meter pegged into the red.

Too bad the facts fly directly in the face of your argument, eh?

Hey Blast, are you gonna pontificate to us some more about the value of brown people?

The last time was rather informative.

Getting your bigotry into the public record really boosts the value of your arguments.

Hey Blast..

Obama spent a 800 billion on welfare THIS year.

In. One. Year.

And for that money, no persons were freed of the horror of religious nuts, nor the horror of a dictatorship that was killing 30,000 of it’s own people for 30 years.

Here’s where you say the equivilant of: “But it’s not crime-free land of gay-sex and kittens, so it was all a waste!!”

And those Bush tax-cuts added the equivilant of two of china’s GDP to our GDP.

You sit there and whine over the money spent by BushCo, yet when Obama spends 10 times as much, you revert to: BUSH SPENT SOME TOO!!!!!

This makes you look stupid.

Because some people do better with pictures.

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See column “F“? That’s spending on Iraq.

See column “G“? That’s gov’t spending 2010-2020.

What was your point again?

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Blast, How about You paying for the Waste, Fraud and Abuse and the rest of US being Tax Exempt?

I do not know if You have a JOB or WORK for a Living. Are You on the receiving end of some Special Program to post your Crap here?

Just askin the tough questions here.

Hey blasted, you seem to miss the fact that no matter how much tax we pay, the govt will continue to spend like madmen. Us paying more taxes isn’t the answer. Them spending less IS. Just goes to show how you scream about Rep spending, then turn around and support mega spending by your side. Tells us you are only about power and control.

I really need to hook up with your supplier. If your posts are even half as indicitive as to the quality of what you are using I could make a fortune on liberal college campuses.

@Blast:

And oh, what about those �tax cuts� that actually drove up the deficit? (and the lie that it was responsible that it helped the economy, we know now that it was a total illusion of funny money).

More graphics to clear things up:

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Curt: Deficits? The very worst year for a deficit under Bush was FY2004 when it was 3.6% of our GDP. By FY2007 we had full employment and our deficit was 1.2% of our GDP. Damn those tax cuts.

You can’t spend percentages, and if you look at the 8 years of Bush we know he doubled the national debt in real terms… and that was in “supposed to be” good economic times. If you think that our present economic conditions are anywhere comparable to 2004 then you need to reevaluate what has happened to the country in the last 18 months. And yeah, that full employment was based upon a orgy of credit default swaps, derivatives (mostly funny money), AND over spending by the government. None of which was sustainable and was a huge house of cards that collapsed last year. Remember the melt down, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, AIG bailout, and the Bush-Paulson TARP program? You are totally blind to reality if you think capitalism was working during the Bush years. I sure believe Bush was responsible for it, he had years to f-it up!

Old Trooper: Blast, How about You paying for the Waste, Fraud and Abuse and the rest of US being Tax Exempt?

I do not know if You have a JOB or WORK for a Living. Are You on the receiving end of some Special Program to post your Crap here?

Just askin the tough questions here.

First Old Trooper, are you saying us sticking the future generations with our deficits is right? If we spend it WE should PAY for it. Period. Lets bring back the call for a Constitutional Amendment that requires a balanced budget. And as for how I support myself, I fail to see how that is any of your business.

Aye Chihuahua, were the huge deficits during the Bush administration acceptable to you?

@Blast:

Aye Chihuahua, were the huge deficits during the Bush administration acceptable to you?

First, the budget deficits under Bush weren’t “huge”, especially in light of what President TrainingPants has brought us:

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The graph above makes it very clear that budget deficits were coming down each year until the financial sector issues that arose in late ’08.

As much as you may like to blame those events on Bush, the root causes were created by Carter and exacerbated by Clinton as well as multiple people in Congress including Barney Frank.

Second, I didn’t vote for Obie and those who did, like yourself, are in no position to be pointing your fingers and shouting BUSHHHHHH. In eight short months Obie has done more to destroy this country and wreck the short and long term economy than the combined efforts of every other president in the history of the republic.

Your guy has quadrupled the national debt and yet you still look over your shoulder and sneer at Bush? You do realize, don’t you, that you’re supporting and carrying the water for a guy who is going to bring the national debt up to 80% of GDP?

You silly, silly little man.

Have you not reached the point yet that you have begun to realize your folly? The Obamateur is an absolute disaster both domestically and on the foreign policy scene.

At this point a redux of Jimmy Carter is the best we can expect and even that is becoming a faint and distant glimmer of hope.

Are the straps on your partisan blinders so tight that they’re impairing your judgment?

Third, when you filed your taxes last year did you send in any extra to the IRS so that they could apply it to the deficit since you obviously feel that you should pay more? How about the year before or the three years before that?

Have you ever?

Did you forgo the monetary benefits of the Bush tax cuts that you decry each and every year since they went into effect?

Probably not.

Hey kids! Let’s review the warped mind of an O-bot, shall we?

Spending under Bush = “Bad.”
(Notice how it changed from “spending on wars”, to all spending, even though military-spending was less than 20% of the yearly budget.)

Thus;

Spending 10X as much = “Good!”
Then let’s call government meddling in the markets “Capitalism”, then call Capitalism “bad” so we can bring on Socialist policies, and have that same government meddle even more, so I can go on a website where everybody thinks I’m a twit, and blindly fellate a man who wants to spend even more, so I can blame it all on a man who is no longer in power, so I can convince myself that this salty taste in my mouth is peanut-brittle.

Now Blast…
We here in the cognitive world label this, “circular logic”, and we try to avoid it as it makes one look as dumb as a box of rocks. Or in your case, proving it.

Now get off your knees, wipe the smegma off your mouth, then go find a pool that your little toes can touch the bottom of, because THIS pool is obviously too deep for you.

Patvann: Now Blast… We here in the cognitive world label this, “circular logic”, and we try to avoid it as it makes one look as dumb as a box of rocks. Or in your case, proving it.

IF you actually read my comments on this subject… I object to government deficits PERIOD. So the only circular logic here and “smegma” is your circle jerkish way you defend the indefensible. I find people who object to Obama’s orgy of spending while not laying that same blame on Bush are disingenuous at best. Just tossing out labels like BDS, or whatever, just attempts to minimize the facts that Bush was in charge for 8 years which culminated in near total collapse of our economy – not to mention his running up more debt than any other president. And I love how Aye’s graph shows the TARP as part of Obama’s deficit vs the man who administration actually foisted that spending upon us.

We need a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget to save us from “conservatives” as well as liberals.

Why don’t YOU go read what you typed in your first posting.

-You wanted to raise taxes to cover debt.

That comes out to over one year’s GDP. 14 trillion. Present tax reciepts are less than 1 trillion/year. Shall we mutiply all taxes by 14?

You just claimed Bush spent more than every president, while ommiting Obama spending 10 times more. You also forget Bush’s less-than 35% approval-rating by conservatives.
This makes you look stupid.

In all subsequent postings, you’ve never ONCE mentioned Obama, but you mentioned Bush 3 times in addition reverting back to wars that Obama now continues. This is BDS.

You have YET to find or express ANY fault with Obama’s spending. This is swallowing smegma.

@Blast:

We’ve already been through the TARP issue with you before, remember this?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/02/who_are_the_big_spenders.html

Re: TARP

Myth. Republicans spent more on bailouts than Democrats. After all, Bush’s bailout, supported by John McCain, was $850B while Obama’s stimulus was only $787B.

Fact. It is true that 850 is more than 787. But when you get into who really asked for what amounts, and who voted for those amounts, the Democrats are responsible for 80% of all bailout spending – and the worst 80%.

The original bailout proposed by the Bush administration was for $700B and its purpose was to save the financial system. But then Congress added another $150B of “sweeteners” unrelated to financial rescue. New cost: $850B. As for the $700B, it would come in two chunks of $350B each, with the second chunk needing a second request by the President and a second approval by Congress.

But a funny thing happened. By January 8, after three months of bailing out troubled assets, only $267B had been spent and the Bush administration saw no special need for the second chunk of money. Bush left it up to Barack Obama to ask for the second chunk of the bailout money. If Obama didn’t want it, Bush was done with the bailout; if Obama did, Bush would go to Congress for the second chunk as a favor to Obama.

On January 12, by letter to Congress, Obama did ask for the second chunk . (President Bush then did the yeoman’s task of formally requesting the second chunk, what with him being the actual President and all.)

Then another funny thing happened. The new Obama administration said it needed a second bailout, a totally separate one, as an economic stimulus rather than a financial system rescue. And its cost would end up being $787B. Total cost of the two bailouts: $1,637B (not including future interest payments).

So we can blame $350B on Bush and $1,287B (the $787B second bailout, the second $350B chunk of the first bailout, and the $150B of sweeteners in the first bailout) on Obama and Congress.

By that measure, Obama and Congress get 79% of the blame.

And who, exactly, voted for these two bailouts in Congress? The stimulus passed with 244 votes in the House (all Democrats) and 60 votes in the Senate (57 Democrats and 3 Republicans). Bush’s bailout passed with 263 votes in the House (172 Democrats and 91 Republicans) and with 74 votes in the Senate (41 Democrats and 33 Republicans). That is, Obama’s stimulus was 99% Democrat and Bush’s bailout was 63% Democrat, going by total votes cast in both houses of Congress.

If we weight the price tags of the two packages by party vote, the Democrats are responsible for $1,315B and the Republicans are responsible for $322B, or a bit more than what actually went to rescue troubled financial assets.

Either way you measure it, the Democrats can claim about 80% of the credit for these two major bailouts totaling more than $1.6 trillion of federal spending, increasing by a third our national debt (held by the public), in less than five months time.

Moreover, the 20% credited to Republicans actually went to troubled financial assets. There is at least a case that this money helped avoid a system-wide breakdown of our banking system, and therefore truly saved us from financial catastrophe. The other 80% is more like very expensive confetti, with entrenched Democratic support groups being the confetti suppliers. They get the real money; we get the confetti and the debt.

Yep, $787B stimulus, 8% across the board increase to the budget, increase in SCHIP, purchase of Obama Motors, etc. his spending just keeps piliing up.

Patvann: Why don’t YOU go read what you typed in your first posting. -You wanted to raise taxes to cover debt.

I said “How about if we actually paid enough taxes to cover what our government actually spends, with or without any health program.”

That would mean, either we cut spending… or increase taxes… it means if WE spend money, WE need to pay of it.

Patvann: You just claimed Bush spent more than every president

You need to be honest in your debate, you don’t even quote me properly “Bush was in charge for 8 years which culminated in near total collapse of our economy – not to mention his running up more debt than any other president.”

If you read what I said, Bush ran up more debt that any other president. That is a fact.

@Blast:

Bush ran up more debt that any other president. That is a fact.

Buzzer sounds.

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You need a new calculator.

Aye, you need to get a calendar, it is 2009, not 2019.

Bush ran up more debt that any other president. That is a fact.

Care to try again, Blast? Sorry that facts get in the way of your BDS.

See full size graphic here

From Heritage Foundation research % of GDP spending went from 18-21% under Bush. The bulk of that went up after the DNC gained control of Congress.

This year, alone… sans health care… Obama and his Congressional puppets take that up to 26%. For the math challenged, that’s a five percent increase in under a year.

What’s the phrase I’m looking for?

Oh, yeah: “Cognitive Dissonance”.

Mata, that graph is laughable. It does show that Republicans have the worst actual record for fiscal responsibility… The reality is that when President Bush took office the

Beginning of Bush’s Presidency – national debt $5,727,776,738,304.64
End of Pres Bush’s Presidency – national debt $10,626,877,048,913.08

(real dollars and not percentages)

Oh, and during those care free economic times our economy took the largest nosedive since the great depression.

Yeah… figures that your blame Dubya crap doesn’t fit your narrow focus. I don’t defend either the GOP or DNC run Congress that presided during the Dubya years. Or haven’t you learned enough of civics to know that only Congress can appropriate, and all the POTUS… no matter what party… can sign or veto.

The danger comes when you have a POTUS, like Obama, demanding entitlement program after entitlement program, and armed with a Congress willing to bankrupt the nation to achieve “social justice”. And that’s where we are now. THe Pelosi/Reid/Obama combo will destroy this nation financially, and turn the US dollar into toilet paper.

The “largest nosedive” was over a decade in the making, and the center of that financial tsunami can be laid squarely at the feet of Congress… both parties.

As far as national debt goes, every admin will end up with a higher number of debt because of inflation. However Bush’s doubling of the national debt over eight years makes him look like Ebenezer Scrooge compared to Obama’s quadrupling of that same debt in under a year. Do you say anything about that? Nope… you defend it by saying Bush was a big spender.

Back to the garbage pile analogy for you.

Oh! I see the bag-of hair’s little self-delusion!

Don’t you all see? This moron wants us to associate 8 YEARS of spending by Bush, to 9 MONTHS of spending by Obama, and have us all believe it that because Obama has SO FAR ACTUALLY SPENT less in those 9 months than those 8 years (but we can’t look at the 8-year projected-costs of his already in-law programs) that we are mistaken in our belief that Obama has spent more.

I know! Lets smoke unicorn farts, and pretend no more money will be spent by Obama EVER, thus making Blast feel good about reaching for the koolaid to wash down the smegma!!!

Patvann:

when Obama took office $10,626,877,048,913.08
debt as of today $11,771,450,693,745.00

I have called Obama’s spending as “an orgy of spending” you obviously have not been listening. Bush was President during what many here have been calling “good economic” times… and so why did the National Debt nearly double during his reign? We all know why Pres Obama is spending so high right now, and that is because our economy is in shambles and his philosophy is that spending will help improve things which will in turn slow the growth of the debt. I am not sure if that is the right direction as I HAVE ADVOCATED HERE A BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT! If we are going to spend something, we need to pay for it! Bush did not do that in 8 years of “good economic times” why the hell not! So if I sound like I am giving Pres Obama a pass, I am not. Just read what I have written. But since Bush is now history… it is easy to judge his success and failure since his policies were disastrous.

MataHarley: figures that your blame Dubya crap doesn’t fit your narrow focus. I don’t defend either the GOP or DNC run Congress that presided during the Dubya years.

The Republicans during President Bush were very unified in getting his policies for tax cuts (or as it should be called, not paying our bills). I am honest for my feelings about Bush, just like those here dislike Obama, that is fair game. I base my position on 8 years of his policies, not just 9 months, and parenthetically the 9 months where the economic world had nearly collapsed. I guess if we could just forget the failures of the Bush administration we could say he had a good presidency, but the failures were very serious and catastrophic in nature.

I keep posting about a Balanced Budget Amendment, why don’t you agree with me on that? Or do you want to leave those future Republicans the opportunity to deficit spend, like that chart you posted before that showed, not projected, but actually that all of the recent Republican presidents were not good at balancing the books.