CBO: Democrats’ $1 Trillion Nationalized Health Care Bill Would Only Cover About 1/3 Of Uninsured

Oh, and apparently some 15 million Americans (probably more if the “government option” health care plan is included) won’t get to keep their current private health care insurance and instead will be pushed off on to government health care. And it will likely cost a lot more than $1 trillion because certain entitlement mandates to be included in the final bill haven’t been calculated yet.
Sound like a bargain yet, America?

CBO finds that the bill, in its incomplete draft form, would cost a lot — more than $1 trillion — and cover a relatively small portion of the uninsured (about one-third).
CBO director Doug Elmendorf notes in his cover letter that the bill they scored did not include the planned expansion of Medicaid to all persons with incomes below 150 percent of the poverty line. That provision would decrease the uninsured rate, but also add hundreds of billions more to the total budgetary cost.
The CBO cost estimate also makes it clear that the president’s repeated statement that Americans will get to keep the health insurance they have today is simply not true. CBO projects that some 15 million people would get pushed out of their job-based plans and into the so-called “gateways” run by the states. That number will go much higher when the bill includes the promised “government option.”

So this “universal coverage” plan won’t really be universal for all the Americans who don’t already have insurance. You know, the ones the Democrats are always crying about and pointing to as a reason to have government health care insurance.
On the flip side, potentially tens of millions of Americans who already have health insurance are going to be pushed on to government health care.
And along the way it’s going to cost us $1 trillion (and probably a whole lot more) of money that our treasury simply does not have.