A Trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon we're talking about real money. [krakatoa]

h/t Hussein the Plumber, Cato Institute's Michael Cannon estimates the cost of ObabamaCare to be 6.5 Trillion dollars.

He comes to this by dispensing with the largest of the gimmicks being employed to keep the true cost hidden:

Offsetting the spending:

“When all this new spending occurs” — i.e., from 2014 through 2023 — “this bill will cost $2.5 trillion over that ten-year period.”

And adding in the cost of individual mandates:

"When the bills force somebody to pay $10,000 to the government, the Congressional Budget Office treats that as a tax. When the government then hands that $10,000 to private insurers, the CBO counts that as government spending. But when the bills achieve the exact same outcome by forcing somebody to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company, it appears nowhere in the official CBO cost estimates — neither as federal revenues nor federal spending."

Slightly on-topic observation: I'm predicting huge profits for those specializing in Unicorn-horn/rectal impaction.

posted by xgenghisx at 02:11 PM

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