Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

I haven't read the CBO report, but I have seen criticisms of the report. While the CBO is non-partisan, it can only "score" the legislation and the assumptions provided to it by Congress. In this instance, my guess is that the underlying assumptions were self-serving.

While I favor all Americans having access to health insurance, no I do not think THIS bill will result in reduced healthcare costs or federal spending over any time frame. I think there were some elements to the bill that would have begun to bend the cost curve, the term the politicians liked to use. But they seem to have been traded away or lobbied out as the bill made its way thru the House and Senate and then House again. Right now what we have, I think, is a bill which provides insurance to an additional 32 million Americans that the rest of us will have to pay for.

Can this "healthcare reform" bill be improved upon by future Congresses? Yes, I think it can. I'd really like for the Republicans to be laying out legislative plans to "tweak away" at this bill when they regain the majority, rather than blustering about saying they'll ty to repeal the bill. That's not going to happen--they know it and we should as well.

They could begin with standalone amendments to do things like provide tort reform, remove the pricing power of the drug companies that keep drugs in the U.S. so expensive, even develop programs which would drive doctors into business models like the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, where the successful treatment of patients is the goal rather than payment for service...stuff like that. As narrow standalone amendments to the fundamental bill, there wouldn't be the opportunity for political partisanship that prevailed with the much larger, more complicated bill just passed. And actually, narrowly-constructed amendments would make the influence of special interest lobbyists very transparent. Hopefully their influence could be limited in the writing of narrower amendments. Yet, the "drip, drip, drip" of well thought out amendments to the bill could make it a really good one over a period of years.