WASHINGTON — As the long battle over health care is rejoined in the Senate this week, experts remain deeply divided over whether the legislation would rein in soaring health-care costs or simply add millions of people to a system that is already driving the nation toward bankruptcy.
Optimists say the $848 billion package drafted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., contains all the most promising ideas for transforming the health-care system and encouraging doctors and hospitals to work more efficiently. They say it would eventually reduce private premiums and the swelling cost of government health care for the elderly and poor.
Even pessimists don’t necessarily disagree. But they see scant evidence that those ideas would quickly bear fruit, and in the short term, they fear that the initiative would leave Washington struggling to pay for a new $200-billion-a-year health program even as existing programs require vast infusions of cash to care for the aging baby-boom generation.
Those concerns were magnified by the release of Reid’s bill, which the Senate will begin debating today.
Democrats were thrilled when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported the package was “paid for,” meaning lawmakers had identified spending cuts and tax increases sufficient to cover the cost of expanding coverage to 30 million additional people.
But the measure would not deliver on Democrats’ most ambitious claims, the CBO found. While the package would not worsen the deficit, it would not significantly improve it, either now or in the future.
Reid’s bill would shave less than 2 percent from deficits projected to top $9 trillion over the next decade. And it would make only “small reductions” after that, the CBO said — about 0.25 percent of GDP — to deficits projected to balloon to roughly 14 percent of the economy by 2035.
“The hope that health-care reform would take care of our budget problem has evaporated,” said Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution.
Many budget experts also worry that lawmakers may not have the stomach to keep the new taxes and spending cuts intended to pay for the package. Republicans are planning to offer an amendment to strike more than $400 billion in proposed Medicare cuts from the package, which would blow a huge hole in financing the bill.
In merging bills drafted in committee, Reid significantly watered down two key cost-containment ideas: a tax on high-cost health insurance policies that was opposed by labor unions and an independent commission designed to automatically and methodically restrain Medicare spending.
House leaders are adamantly opposed to both ideas.
“I do give them credit for shooting for deficit reduction as a target,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the nonprofit Concord Coalition, which promotes a balanced federal budget. “But . . . even if these things work, it’s not of the magnitude that is needed to prevent us from going over the cliff.”
White House Budget Director Peter Orszag said health reform was never intended to reduce deficits immediately, but rather to set in motion a process that would avert a fiscal catastrophe decades down the road.
“The legislation is reflecting all the ideas that have been put forward in health policy circles for years and creating a feedback and continuous-improvement loop that will allow us to learn as we go,” Orszag said. “When someone says it’s not guaranteed to work, my response is: Doing nothing is guaranteed to fail.”
