Obama administration refuses to review health care cost report prior to vote (Update)

One week prior to the health care vote in Congress, the Obama administration received a report from Medicare and Medicaid actuaries indicating medical costs would increase more than $38 billion each year for the next 10 years. Nobody wanted to even look at it until after the vote.

Update: So it seems Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did not hold back the report. Instead of updating this post, please see the new one posted just after 2:30 p.m. ET.

This does not surprise me one bit, research and cost planning certainly do not matter to this administration. Hat tip to Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit. (More from Hoft here.)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQZsfbLG-o8

The 38 page report is a secured PDF, therefore it does not make it easy to copy and paste text – from a government report mind you – into blog posts for review. So if you want to know more you will need to read the document, not just excerpts.

Does the secure PDF indicate government bureaucrats want to hide information from you? Maybe not, but add this from American Spectator yesterday morning, and you’ve got a federal government bureaucracy that is the opposite from transparent.

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama’s health care “reform” law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.

“The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote,” says an HHS source. “Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think.”

The analysis, performed by Medicare’s Office of the Actuary, which in the past has been identified as a “nonpolitical” office, set off alarm bells when submitted. “We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff,” says the HHS staffer, “and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary’s office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report.”

In the end, the report was released several weeks after the vote — the review by the secretary’s office reportedly took less than three days — and bore a note that the analysis was not the official position of the Obama administration.

How many uninsured are there?

Forty-five million? Twenty million? This report indicates there are 57 million uninsured. (Screen shot of text)

Other interesting information from the report
Delivered from the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)

• They estimate individual penalties would provide $33 billion in revenue to the federal government between 2014 and 2019. (Page 5)
• About 14 million would lose employer-based coverage, and about 13 million would gain employer-based programs, partly due to expansion of family coverage to “kids” up to 26 year of age. Not sure what happens to the 1 million who just lose coverage. (Page 7)
• Twenty-three million  – yes 23 million – remain uninsured in 2019. They – in my opinion – low-balled the illegal alien number pegging it at 5 million(?) (Page 8)
• Medicare “savings” on page 8… $223 billion reduction in Part A and Part B payment levels. Reduce disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments by $50 billion. Reduce Medicare Advantage payment benchmarks by $145 billion. Implement strict Medicare expenditure growth rate targets $24 billion. (Is that a lot of cuts for Medicare?)

This is complicated stuff and not a very “sexy” story. We’ll spend more on health care in the United States, and Obama promised the opposite … that is what it comes down to right?

Others writing include Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.