CBO: Obamacare to cost $1.76 trillion over 10 yrs
by Philip Klein, Washington Examiner
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. That’s because we now have estimates for Obamacare’s first nine years of full implementation, rather than the mere six when it was signed into law. Only next year will we get a true ten-year cost estimate, if the law isn’t overturned by the Supreme Court or repealed by then. Given that in 2022, the last year available, the gross cost of the coverage expansions are $265 billion, we’re likely looking at about $2 trillion over the first decade, or more than double what Obama advertised…. READ MORE
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CBO: Obama’s health law to cost less, cover fewer people than first thought
President Obama’s healthcare reform law coverage provisons will cost less but cover fewer people than first thought, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.
The revised estimate of the law’s coverage provisions shows about 2 million fewer people gaining coverage by 2016, reducing the number of uninsured Americans by 30 million instead of the 32 million projected a year ago. That would leave about 27 million people uninsured in 2016, two years after the law’s insurance exchanges go online.
Four million Americans can expect to lose their employer-provided healthcare by 2016, according to the revised figures, far more than the 1 million people estimated last year. And 1 million to 2 million fewer people will gain access to the law’s subsidized exchanges than first thought, while an extra 1 million are expected to qualify for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Provision (CHIP).
CBO faults a slower than anticipated recovery for the soft numbers, along with technical changes to CBO’s estimating procedures and legislative changes adopted over the past year. In particular, Congress passed bipartisan legislation to make it harder for people with Social Security income to qualify for federal health benefits.
“Fewer people are now expected to obtain health insurance coverage from their employer or in insurance exchanges; more are now expected to obtain coverage from Medicaid or CHIP or from nongroup or other sources,” CBO said. “More are expected to be uninsured.”… READ MORE