CBO estimate of ObamaCare 2x expensive as generally reported

Thursday, July 16th, 2009 | Health Care |

A trillion dollars over 10 years? Nope.

Actually, it’s really a cool trillion over five years. Eyeball the graph Philip Klein posted this afternoon and admire the left’s sleight of hand. They’re using a 10-year timeline to create the illusion that the program costs $100 billion a year or so. In fact, it’ll be more than $200 billion once it gets going, which won’t happen until 2014, and that’s assuming that the cost projections aren’t wildly over-optimistic the way every other projection they’ve made this year has turned out to be. In fact, the trillion-dollar figure doesn’t even account for all expenses; as MKH notes, the CBO has yet to compute “administrative costs” of implementing the program or the effect it’ll have on other areas of federal spending. Still, give The One credit for consistency: Whether it’s borrowing from future generations to pay for the stimulus or hiding the costs of his health-care boondoggle by backloading them, he’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Scary hockeystick graph of the Obamacare cost nightmare found here.

LATER: Obama healthcare bill would outlaw private insurance:

It didn’t take long to run into an “uh-oh” moment when reading the House’s “health care for all Americans” bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee. It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Tags: obama, obamacare