Posted on 03/13/2012 4:34:24 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Via Philip Klein. The original 10-year price tag, the one that made it "safe" (but not really safe) for Democrats to drop this fiscal atomic bomb, was $940 billion. What happened, you ask? Well, see for yourself:
Remember, they gamed this thing so that it wouldn’t take effect until 2014, which means that the cost of the first four years of implementation was essentially zero. That $940 billion figure really represented just six years of cost, not 10, but it was politically invaluable to Democratic messaging in letting them tout the bill as costing less than a trillion dollars. Now that we’re nearing 2014 and the 10-year window of cost projections has slid forward, you can see what this leviathan boondoggle really costs: $1.76 trillion, soon to top $2 trillion when the window slides forward another year in 2013 and the new projection reaches into 2023.
But wait. More good news:
President Obama’s healthcare reform law coverage provisons will cost less but cover fewer people than first thought, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.
The revised estimate of the law’s coverage provisions shows about 2 million fewer people gaining coverage by 2016, reducing the number of uninsured Americans by 30 million instead of the 32 million projected a year ago. That would leave about 27 million people uninsured in 2016, two years after the law’s insurance exchanges go online.
Four million Americans can expect to lose their employer-provided healthcare by 2016, according to the revised figures, far more than the 1 million people estimated last year. And 1 million to 2 million fewer people will gain access to the law’s subsidized exchanges than first thought, while an extra 1 million are expected to qualify for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Provision (CHIP).
Thanks to the economy, we’re going to end up with a lot fewer people getting health insurance through the workplace than previously estimated and a lot more people getting it through Medicaid, which, as Klein notes, inches us a little closer to that government takeover of health care that the left insists is a conservative myth. In fact, the only “good news” here is that projected revenue from penalties imposed on employers and the uninsured is up slightly, which means the net cost of O-Care has dropped by $48 billion to a cool $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. But don’t worry: We’re going to pay for that with cuts to Medicare and other stuff that’ll never, ever, ever, ever, ever happen in the real world. He’ll figure it out in his second term. Stay tuned.
And we know that’s an optimistic forecast. The reality will be far worse.
Cloward-Piven writ large, yet not one media whore will even raise the issue of this ‘community organizer, affirmative action fraud.
This whole health care is a scam on the American people and the President and his Democrat supporters know it. Except for those that voted for him. Maybe now they will listen.
This thing will go up faster than the projected cost of the California bullet train and green energy initiatives.
We can afford neither.
Just?
If our side is stupid enough to NOT use this in ads, Twitter, Facebook, etc, then we deserve to give the country away. Where’s Boehner? Where’s Reince?
It really doesn’t matter how much this will cost. We don’t have the money anyway. Plus, “insuring” everyone is not what this is all about.
I do hope around when all obama worshippers start losing their insurance. of course, they’ll believe it’s because the republicans took over the house.
Wow...who saw this coming?
in 1965 the the ten year estimate for medicare was
9b,
it ended up being 109b.
I suspect that is about the magnitude the error obacare will be.
Here's a pretty good sense of exactly how “far worse” ...
The cost of Medicare is a good place to begin. At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly “conservative” estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.
http://reason.com/archives/1993/01/01/the-medicare-monster
Given the fact that Congressional mendacity is more developed now than in 1966..we can definitely expect several orders of magnitude worse...
What I want to say would get me a visit. This is like watching a missle pointed right at you and there is little you can do about it.
FFFUUUBBBOOO!!!
We will never know the true cost because it’s, by definition, unlimited. Their original plan was to cover 40 million uninsured people at no additional cost. That cannot happen and anyone with half a brain and a legit birth certificate knows it.
We’ve put too much faith in the experts over the last 30 or so years. The PhDs, the book writers, the experts on TV, the economists within government and the financial institutions.
What we need now is redneck economists, redneck statisticians, redneck mathematicians, redneck anthropholgists, redneck psychologists, redneck sex experts, redneck historians, redneck lawyers, and so on.
These experts can present their findings on redneckopedia.com.
Seriously, economics, to take one example, has been presented to us as something more complex and above our heads than it really is. We have been victims of snow jobs.
We will never know the true cost because it’s, by definition, unlimited. Their original plan was to cover 40 million uninsured people at no additional cost. That cannot happen and anyone with half a brain and a legit birth certificate knows it.
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