Anyone shocked?
Congressional Budget Office estimates released Tuesday predict the health care overhaul will likely cost about $115 billion more in discretionary spending over ten years than the original cost projections.
The additional spending — if approved over the years by Congress — would bring the total estimated cost of the overhaul to over $1 trillion.
As it turns out this almost precisely negates the amount the bill is supposed to reduce the deficit, i.e. $138 billion. And of course that doesn’t include all the other double counting and false promises used to arrive at that imaginary number.
Doesn’t matter…..the costs and effects of this boondoggle will be huge, and one effect predicted is already starting to become a reality:
The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill is how the corporations that provide coverage for most Americans — coverage they know and prize — will react to the new law’s radically different regime of subsidies, penalties, and taxes.
Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill’s critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government.
That would dismantle the employer-based system that has reigned since World War II. It would also seem to contradict President Obama’s statements that Americans who like their current plans could keep them. And as we’ll see, it would hugely magnify the projected costs for the bill, which controls deficits only by assuming that America’s employers would remain the backbone of the nation’s health care system.
~~~Hence, health-care reform risks becoming a victim of unintended consequences. Amazingly, the corporate documents that prove this point became public because of a different set of unintended consequences: they told a story far different than the one the politicians who demanded them expected.
What does it mean for health care reform if the employer-sponsored regime collapses? By Fortune’s reckoning, each person who’s dropped would cost the government an average of around $2,100 after deducting the extra taxes collected on their additional pay. So if 50% of people covered by company plans get dumped, federal health care costs will rise by $160 billion a year in 2016, in addition to the $93 billion in subsidies already forecast by the CBO. Of course, as we’ve seen throughout the health care reform process, it’s impossible to know for certain what the unintended consequences of these actions will be.
But hey, Obama said if we all liked our current plan we can keep it right?
Complete and utter baloney.
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Rationing, it’s the next big thing. Got to rid the world of all the grannies.
ObamaCare will prove to be problematic and create (most likely, like technological advances also) just as many problems as it may intend to address. It’s the nature of problems for which we have no pragmatic solutions, and in the eyes of many means that we really do not have a health care issue / problem.
However, to the extent that either side of the aisle has a theoretical interest in improving the health of its citizens and the health care provided, it is necessary to recognize two very fundamental issues:
1) The politicalization of the issue, or utilization of an ideological approach, will not result in an effective solution, because most human beings are not sufficiently self-motivated to pursue optimal health. It’s just not going to happen, and an ideological approach does not advance the health agenda.
2) Because of our (minimum of) two party governmental system, ANY approach formulated will be ineffective because it is a moderate, piecemeal, compromised approach to solving the problem. Imagine giving kids a vaccine which has been diluted, watered down, or adulterated with all sorts of ingredients not essential to attacking the disease.
Why do ANYTHING if it is not going to be effective? Why waste the time and the money pursuing goals through ineffective means?
This issue will NEVER be resolved by either side as long as people have freedom of choice. It’s the nature of human beings.
As Dirty Harry once said, “A man (or humankind) has to know his (or its) limitations.
Not even surprised that the true costs are only creeping out, because someone somewhere is using up all his fingers to plug leaks. I’d favor a pool to bet on how high they end up. This would have to have a deadline, of course, because it will keep getting higher until repealed or there is no money anywhere, whichever comes first. So my bet is, one year from today, the “true costs” will be triple the present “true costs” — and it will still be a year to implementation, when the true true costs start to be evident.
To think we could have paid for all the uninsured to be treated in Cuba (Michael Moore has assured us their medical system is superior) and saved billions. Cuba could improve its economy and we wouldn’t be facing poverty.
Skookum, maybe it’s not too late. Maybe the good guys will take over congress and redistribute the liberals–to Cuba, Venezuela, Gaza—
And this is before the doc fix. Democrats lied through their damn teeth about the costs of this plan and you have to be an idiot to ever trust them again for anything.
Alas! The solution: Send Barack Hussein Obama to Communist Cuba PERMANENTLY. And, Good riddance!
REGGIE GREEN / THE LOGISTICIAN: i am impress with your name, hi,what i want to say is, they where warn in advance not to get that bill throught; the TEAPARTY did enouph rallies in front of the government to let them know it was wrong, beside the republicans trying to advise them not to continiue, so he said “I WON” and now for as long as he try ,he lost credibility with the majority and he cannot blame anyone. bye 🙄
This should not come as any big surprise to those of us who have studied and read the bill, and in my own personal opinion, it will get much worse the longer Obamacare is allowed to remain alive and kicking.
Wait until they find out how much it will cost to payout for the rash of bogus and real malpractice awards and settlements that will arise as each jury decides that the government can afford to be more “generous” than private doctors, hospitals, etc., not that many of those will be left after Obamacare crushes them.
0-bama care may create the windfall Republicans need to turn things around and provide hope for America. Illegal immigration also holds real promise. America is starting to realize what a loser 0-bama is and how he lied!! Not far behind is the MSM who jumped on board and now should pay the price as well. Demorats who are up for re election (at least those who don’t chicken out and retire) are going to have a lot of splanin to do to their constituants.
Paul Ryan explained the real costs behind this plan and even used simple terms so liberals could follow along and still they choose to try and bankrupt this nation…
How any of them sleep at night is beyond me….
I’ve only been here 6 months or so, and the stuff here is first rate. Better debates and news and participants than most any other site i’ve been to!
WAIT, you mean that government projections are off?
I guess there’s a first time for everything.
Larry… SHOCKING isn’t it?!?!?! LOL!! The “Messiah” got it wrong??? Well as they used to say in Show Business….. “You Ain’t Seen NOTHING Yet”!!!!
That’s the part that worries me!
Oh I haven’t filed a federal tax form since since 1999, so they can ring it up all they like. I pay for my own healthcare and I got my own little national defense too. I keep it under my pillow and hanging in the back of my truck.
Yep, sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes by a factor of 10:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 (2002) — The administration’s top budget official estimated today that the cost of a war with Iraq could be in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion, a figure that is well below earlier estimates from White House officials.
In a telephone interview today, the official, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., director of the Office of Management and Budget, also said there was likely to be a deficit in the fiscal 2004 budget, though he declined to specify how large it would be. The administration is scheduled to present its budget to Congress on Feb. 3.
Mr. Daniels would not provide specific costs for either a long or a short military campaign against Saddam Hussein. But he said that the administration was budgeting for both, and that earlier estimates of $100 billion to $200 billion in Iraq war costs by Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s former chief economic adviser, were too high.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/politics/31BUDG.html
@Greg:
Bit of apples and oranges you got going there and a bit off topic to boot, but we get what you are attempting.
AUMF…..passed with bipartisan support, at the time the public understood war is unpredictable, as is a war budget.
ObamaScare, purposely rammed through by trickery before the CBO was able to run all the figures. At the time, the majority of the public well understood the costs incurred by the healthcare boondoggle would increase.