Many, many readers ask:
How are they paying for this?
Where is the money coming from?
There’s no way they can pay for this. What’s the deal?
You know there’s not way they can possible raise a trillion dollars. When will you admit they lie?
Deficit reducing? Come on.
I tried going through the CBO report. But it’s almost impossible to break the revenues apart from everything else. Then The Tax Foundation did the heavy lifting for me. Here’s how it breaks out:
- $416.5 billion from Medicare spending cuts ($136 billion is Medicare Advantage reductions, $196 billion is fee-for-service rate reductions, $36 billion is DSH payment reductions, and the rest is “other”).
- $210 billion from an additional 0.9% Medicare Tax on income above $200K for individuals and $250K for married couples, plus additional Medicare tax of 3.8% on investment income for those same people
- $107 billion from fees on insurers and medical providers
- $69 billion from penalties from employer/individual “mandates”
- $52 billion from other net spending cuts (including education reform)
- $45 billion from Medicaid spending cuts
- $32 billion from excise (“Cadillac”) tax
- $149 billion from other revenue provisions
Add that up and you get $1.085 trillion dollars. Since the bill is projected to cost $938 billion, that’s how you get a deficit reduction of $142.5 billion.
UPDATE: Sigh. I missed the nice graph they put together. You can go see it at Austin’s site.
