Surprise. Surprise. Obamacare Over $1 Trillion

Congressional Budget Office estimates released Tuesday predict the health care overhaul will likely cost about $115 billion more in discretionary spending over ten years than the original cost projections.

The additional spending — if approved over the years by Congress — would bring the total estimated cost of the overhaul to over $1 trillion.


The CBO released the estimates in response to a request from California Rep. Jerry Lewis, ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. A spokeswoman for Lewis said the inquiry was filed before the House voted on the bill.

“[L]arge sums of discretionary spending in both the House and Senate versions of the health care reform bills have not yet been included in estimates by the CBO, rendering it impossible to make informed decisions regarding the outcome of this legislation,” Lewis wrote in a February letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asking her to postpone votes until the discretionary spending analysis was complete.

The CBO estimated in March that the gross cost of the overhaul would be $940 billion over 10 years. The net cost was estimated at $788 billion over 10 years. But the group cautioned that it couldn’t make an estimate of the discretionary costs without more time and information.


Small wonder the Democrats rammed though the legislation, instead of waiting.


What about all those young people who just decide to pay the penalty instead of buying insurance.  Or how about those companies, some quite large, that just dump their employees on the government and pay the penalty.  Verizon and AT&T are thinking about doing just that.


How about the history of government overruns:


In 1965, the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that the hospital insurance program of Medicare - the federal health care program for the elderly and disabled - would cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual cost that year was $67 billion.

In 1967, the House Ways and Means Committee said the entire Medicare program would cost $12 billion in 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was $98 billion.

In 1987, Congress projected that Medicaid - the joint federal-state health care program for the poor - would make special relief payments to hospitals of less than $1 billion in 1992. Actual cost: $17 billion.

The list goes on. The 1993 cost of Medicare's home care benefit was projected in 1988 to be $4 billion, but ended up at $10 billion. The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which was created in 1997 and projected to cost $5 billion per year, has had to be supplemented with hundreds of millions of dollars annually by Congress.

Barely two weeks in office, Mr. Obama signed a $33 billion bill that will add 4 million mostly low-income children to the SCHIP program over the next 4 1/2 years.