CBO Report Has The Cost Of Obamacare Doubling

It’s becoming more and more clear that Obamacare is going to cost Americans dearly, as individuals. From skyrocketing premiums to our new part-time economy, the implementation of the law is going to be painful.

And, according to the CBO, its going to be twice as painful in terms of the tax dollars it will cost us:

When President Obama was selling his health care legislation to Congress, he declared that “the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.” But with the law’s major provisions set to kick in next year, a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office projects that the law will cost double that, or $1.8 trillion.

What accounts for the dramatic difference? It’s true that at the time of passage, the CBO said the gross cost of the law’s provisions to expand insurance coverage would be $940 billion over a decade. But as many critics of the health care law pointed out at the time, this number was deceptive because it estimated spending from 2010 through 2019 even though the program’s major spending provisions weren’t scheduled to go into effect until 2014. Effectively, the original estimate measured the cost of six years of Obamacare instead of 10.

This isn’t surprising. As the article notes, the scoring of Obamacare at the time of its passage took into account ten years of taxes and just six years of cost. In short, it was a skewed fiscal picture, but Democrats insisted that the calculus was correct and as late as last year Democrats like Senator Heidi Heitkamp were claiming that the law would actually be a cost saver.

It would be interesting to hear Senator Heitkamp answer questions about the cost of Obamacare now even as she votes to keep the law in place.