Now It Can Be Told: CBO Says Health Care Will Cost $115 Billion More Than They Originally Estimated

Well, that's why God created erasers the delete key.

The revised figure is due to estimated costs to federal agencies to implement the new health care reform bill – such as administrative expenses for the Internal Revenue Services and the Department of Health and Human Services -- and the costs for a "variety of grant and other program spending for which specified funding levels for one or more years are provided in the act."

CBO had originally estimated that the health care reform bill would result in a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion from 2010-2019; this revised number would eliminate most of that savings.

In a statement, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said that the new CBO analysis "provides ample cause for alarm. This comes just weeks after the Obama administration itself released an analysis confirming that the new law actually increases Americans’ health care costs. The American people wanted one thing above all from health care reform: lower costs, which Washington Democrats promised, but they did not deliver. These revelations widen the serious credibility gap President Obama is facing."

Office of Management and Budget spokesman Kenneth Baer said in response that the health care law "will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion in the first decade, and that will not change unless Congress acts to change it. If these authorizations are funded, they must be offset somewhere else in the discretionary budget. The President has called for a non-security discretionary spending freeze, and he will enforce that with his veto pen."

It's interesting that the increased costs come from added overhead.

Democrats complained that private insurance was inefficient and had to much overhead and not enough patient care money. Meanwhile they are adding billions and billions of dollars in, er, overhead to their plan.

This kind of variable is something you think the government would have a better handle on from the start. They have a lot of experience, unfortunately, of starting programs and staffing them. You'd think they be able to have their implementation cost estimates last more than 2 months before they started going up. Guess not. I wonder how much these overhead costs will rise in the next 4 years when the program really starts to kick in.

Administrative costs should be one of the most predicable variables in this monstrosity. What do you think is going to happen to real spending on programs (where the big money is) when bills start coming in from unpredictable things like people and their various illnesses. How long do you think the fake CBO numbers on actual health care costs 5 or 6 years from now will stand up? Yeah, just like all other government entitlement programs...way more costs than estimated.

But don't worry, it's not as if we are already in debt up to our necks and living on borrowed money. Oh wait.

Seems one side in this debate knew this would happen all along and the other lied about the costs. When will opponents of the health care law get their apology from Democrats and the MFM? Right, as soon as the ice age gets to Hell.

posted by DrewM. at 10:27 AM

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