Obama’s federal health care law, which is now front of theU.S. Supreme Court, will bankrupt the U.S. and destroy the country’s health care system, Rep. Paul Ryan, (R) Wis., told CNBC Tuesday.
“It vastly underestimates how many employers will actually drop their employer health insurance and dump people into the government exchange,” Ryan said.
In fact, he said private sector actuaries have told him that within a couple of years, about two-thirds of employers will “wash their hands” of offering health insurance to employees.
“Just about everybody will be in the [government] exchange,” Ryan said.
The result, he said, will be the "implosion of the health care system and an explosion of our public debt."
Ryan, the House budget chairman, also addressed his budget, which is expected to go to the House floor for a vote this week. It aims to cut spending by over $5 trillion and lower the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years.
“A debt crisis is coming,” he told Larry Kudlow. “We feel we have an obligation to the country to show how we will pre-empt and prevent a debt crisis.”
The primary driver of the country's debt crisis is Medicare, he said.
“If you do not get a handle on Medicare reform, you never ever, ever balance the budget, let alone get the debt under control,” he said.
Ryan says critics who think the plan doesn’t balance the budget fast enough need to look a little deeper. He said he had to use a static Congressional Budget Office baseline, which assumes massive tax increases and increased debt that slow down growth.
“Our budget doesn’t look as good as it otherwise would if he had economic growth,” he said. “With reasonable growth assumptions, we show with our alternative growth scenario, we’ll balance the budget far faster than the static CBO analysis shows.”
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