A new grassroots organization, the Partnership for America, is asking Congress' Super Committee for a complete repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act as the first step toward government spending cuts.
The Super Committee is the group of yet-to-be-appointed lawmakers who'll serve on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction created under the Budget Control Act of 2011.
According to James Wootton, chairman of Partnership for America, "Substantial additional savings could be achieved if the 'Super Committee' were to propose repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and replacing it with a less costly plan – a move that could make reaching critical deficit-cutting goals far easier."
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Partnership for America's policy director James C. Capretta said: "We are in the process of working with stakeholders to design a common-sense, market-based replacement for PPACA that will cover the most vulnerable Americans with secure coverage at a cost that is hundreds of billions of dollars less over a ten year period than what Congress passed in 2010."
Former Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Holtz-Eakin has estimated that actual costs for the ACA could reach $2 trillion over the next decade, rather than the approximately $1 trillion originally estimated, because of substantial employer dumping of currently covered workers. The CBO's estimates of savings from repeal might not reach such a level, but the country's creditors and financial-rating agencies would certainly welcome the reduced risk of explosive entitlement cost growth.
"Huge cuts in federal programs, especially from defense and programs helping low income Americans, could be avoided with genuine health care reform instead of the expensive federal takeover now in current law," Wootton said. "The 'Super Committee' and other lawmakers should take the next few months to investigate the true impact of PPACA on the federal debt and move aggressively to replace PPACA with a far less costly way of addressing the very real problems facing the American health system."
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