LOPEZ: How will Obamacare “harm taxpayers”?

TANNER: Obamacare will be expensive. The Congressional Budget Office’s initial scoring of Ted Kennedy’s health-care bill shows it would cost at least $1 trillion over the next ten years. But that does not include either the cost of the bill’s planned expansion of Medicaid or interest costs. Inclusion of those provisions will raise the total cost to nearly $2 trillion. To pay for this, Americans should brace for massive tax increases — and not just on the wealthy. In fact, many of the tax increases being considered to pay for health reform — taxing employer-provided health benefits; soda and beer taxes; restricting or eliminating flexible-spending accounts and health-savings accounts; eliminating the deductibility of health expenses above 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income, etc. — fall heavily on the middle class.

LOPEZ: How will Obamacare harm health-care providers?

TANNER: Government programs like Medicare and Medicaid currently under-reimburse health-care providers. Most of those costs are shifted to private insurance. But a new government-run plan would be able to impose those low reimbursement across a much larger spectrum, while also making cost-shifting much harder. In addition, Obamacare envisions the use of government-sponsored comparative-effectiveness and cost-effectiveness research to interfere in treatment decisions.

"The Congressional Budget Office has just...concluded that it would result in roughly 23 million people losing the insurance they currently have. And that does not include the so-called public option."

TANNER: There is no doubt that health care needs reform. But if people believe that nothing could be worse than what we have today, they are mistaken. If we let the government take over the U.S. health-care system, it will become unimaginably worse.

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