the savings from solving the free rider problem of emergency room care used by millions, that savings alone is huge. we all benefit from that, as mitt emphasized.

This is a great question and I don't know the answer. But adding a bunch of people to the entitlement roles does not change the cost equation.

right exactly.

I'm all for an infrastructre stimulus. Jobs, improve infrastructure, employment, win win win.

Education shouldn't be part of a stimulus, we should just be spending way more money on it. Like for example teachers should make 6 figures and competition should be fierce, not the nonsense with low pay and effective tenure we have now

Obamacare contains a large amount of

1) Cuts to Medicare
2) Revenue generating taxes

It's not magic. If the sum of those cuts is larger than the subsidies to poor people, it will cut the deficit.

How does solving the free rider problem do anything but make some people pay there fair share. It doesn't change the total amount spent just changes how the bill is paid. I thought your original assertion was that all these people are going to get healthcare and something something cost goes down.

cuz emergency rooms are so expensive. by waiting until the last moment, not preventing, etc. and that cost is passed on to other consumers of health care. the hospital must raise cost of rooms, etc. so the insurance becomes more expensive. so now it wont be. so insurance companies can be forced to pay 80 or more percent of their premiums on actually delivering health care like in obamacare but will stay in business because costs are down. and medicaid and medicare becomes cheaper.

and insurance companies are running the exchanges so they have lots more customers, they just have to actually deliver health care to people with their money, not golden parashoots. (sp?)

This isn't what Annatta asserted. He said that total cost was going down not that the increased cost was going to be covered by increased taxes. It might be deficit neutral (but these planned medicare cuts smell a lot like the bull**** currently in the CBO plans with $500M in cuts that get reversed every year with the doctor fix) but spending is going up.

Increased access to cheap preventative care
Less money spent on extracting money from people without insurance

Those are just a couple ideas.

The New England Journal of Medicine calls BS on the myth that preventative care reduces total healthcare cost.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0708558

an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure its 1/16th cheaper!

With the very limited exception of ensuring everyone has easy cheap/free access to birth control, we don't know whether preventative care reduces overall healthcare costs, anyone who says they do is lying or deluded.

For example, preventative care is not created equal. Monthly check-ups for 25 year olds is a money loser. Birth control or yearly mammograms or colonoscopies is a money saver. It's a massive optimization problem to solve.

Having people be present and aware of their health however, has more value then what people typically think of with preventative care saves money (catching cancer early). Not only that but the times you do catch things early and cure them the savings are way more than unpaid health costs but you typically have massive unmeasured savings in human capital.

I am sure that their will be some things that will save total cost. Reduced ER visits and less bill collectors. But if people think that this won't be completely overwhelmed by adding 50 million people to the insurance rolls....I dunno it just insane.
Maybe its the right thing to do. It sucks that so many people go without healthcare. But reducing cost?

i'm always surprised how brazenly anti obamacare some of my companies executives are

That is kind of surprising. I thought they insurance industry got a pretty sweetheart deal.

the way obama addressed preventative care in his statements this afternoon, was very deceptive. He wants you to think that this bill, for the first time ever, will make insurance companies provide preventative care measures. Insurance companies are already forced to cover these thing, and many of them would even if there were no laws, but obama is there to trick you.