Dr. Scott Gottlieb writes in The New York Post that the health care reform envisioned in the Senate bill could actually increase costs on most people who buy private health insurance.

He writes:  “It’s increasingly clear that the initial impact of President Obama’s health-care reform will be to raise the cost of health insurance and the number of uninsured Americans, perhaps sharply.

You see, the parts of the reform package that promised to reduce insurance costs, and get more people insured, kick in years after the legislation would start imposing hefty new costs on consumers.

Obama has endorsed the bill produced by the Senate Finance Committee, which is being tweaked for a vote by the full Senate. The plan’s core element — the creation of state-based exchanges for the purchase of subsidized coverage — won’t change, nor will the basic schemes on how Democrats plan to pay for it.

Yet it prescribes added pain first, and promised relief only later.

Starting in 2010, the bill would impose annual fees of $2.3 billion on brand-name drugs and $4 billion on medical devices, plus $6.7 billion on certain insurance providers — and more than $100 billion in cuts to what Medicare pays to health-care providers. These costs will immediately shift onto consumers, in the form of higher prices on medical products and rising premiums.

Meanwhile, the promised subsidies to help pay for insurance don’t fully kick in until 2014. (And those subsidies only go to people earning below 300 percent of the poverty line, or about $66,000 for a family of four.)

Front-loading these taxes and cuts in reimbursements is the only way Congress has found to keep the nominal cost of ObamaCare below $900 billion. It’s a gimmick: The bill uses 10 years of revenue to pay for about five years of benefits, since the subsidies don’t fully kick in until after 2014.” 

Worse, it’s a gimmick that imposes a stiff price on the public: The taxes and spending cuts of the early years will force the cost of private insurance up immediately, prompting some Americans to drop coverage before they have any access to the plan’s subsidies. (And putting some form of government-run “public” insurance option into the bill can’t change this grim equation.)

Read the rest of the column.

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