My theme is that the ObamaCare CBO score was based on a fraud. But hidden in ObamaCare is a more pernicious fraud: "bending the cost curve" by covert rationing.
Here is the introduction:
In the final days before the climactic ObamaCare vote in Congress, one hotly disputed issue was the reliability of the Congressional Budget Office's projection that the health plan would cost "only" $940 billion over 10 years. Critics charged that this figure was artificially low because it included a projected 21% cut in Medicare payments to physicians that Congress would later restore as a separate $247 billion "doc fix." In essence, ObamaCare critics charged that supporters were engaged in fraudulent accounting.(Read the full text of "The Real ObamaCare Fraud".)
The critics are right. In the short term, politicians are unlikely to leave the draconian 21% Medicare cuts in place, because it would force many physicians to treat Medicare patients at a loss. Many doctors would drop their Medicare patients (or at least refuse to accept new ones), creating an outcry from the senior citizens' lobby. The projected cuts have already been postponed multiple times. Originally scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2010, Congress first postponed them until March 1, 2010, then until April 1, 2010, then again until October 2010.
However, such postponements won't solve the long-term problem of rising Medicare costs. Hence, under ObamaCare the federal government also plans on cutting Medicare spending through measures that don't overtly force doctors to lose money. Although these measures will be portrayed as steps to improve "quality" and "cost effectiveness," they will in fact have the opposite effects of reducing quality of care and leading to de facto rationing. These constitute the real fraud of ObamaCare...
