CBO: Obamacare Will Cost More Money, Insure Less People

I hate to say I told you so, but…

CBO: Obamacare to cost $1.76 trillion over 10 yrs

President Obama’s national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projection released today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law.

Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO’s standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama’s pledge that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion over 10 years.” When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.

Today, the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and the results are as critics expected: the ten-year cost of the law’s core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now ballooned to $1.76 trillion.

Don’t bother acting surprised. It was all designed this way. We all know that if government ventures like this always cost more than advertised. Medicare Part D, state-funded infrastructure projects, or basically anything the government  is involved in has a pretty unique trend of costing more and delivering less.

Speaking of delivering less, turns out that is true of Obamacare too:

Obamacare spends $1.5 trillion to increase % of insured from 82% today to 93% in 2022 goo.gl/vCQrH

— Conn Carroll (@conncarroll) March 13, 2012

That’s right, the taxpayers will be spending nearly $2 trillion, double what they were told Obamacare would cost back when it was being sold by President Obama, to cover barely 10% more Americans. That’s twice as much money for 2 million less insured. To boot, more people are going to lose their employer-based health care because of the mandate. Money well spent? Yeah, no.

Government trying to deliver on something like this is akin to trying to vaccinate a balloon. It just doesn’t work.