CBO ups health care cost projections - Jennifer Haberkorn - POLITICO.com

CBO ups health care cost projections - Jennifer Haberkorn - POLITICO.com

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.

Republicans pounced on the news, which they called another sign that the Obama administration makes promises it cannot deliver.

“The American people wanted one thing above all from health care reform: lower costs, which Washington Democrats promised, but they did not deliver,” said House Minority Leader John A Boehner (R-Ohio). “It was clearly irresponsible for Washington Democrats to force this legislation through Congress without being truthful about its full impact on the nation’s finances. Republicans are fighting to repeal this job-killing health care law and replace it with reforms focused first on lowering costs and protecting American jobs.”

But a Democratic leadership aide on Capitol Hill said the Congress will have to stay within the budget.

"Just like other authorized programs, the discretionary programs in health reform will need to compete for funds within set budgetary limits,” the aide said. “Republicans fighting to repeal reform can say what they want, but the bottom line is that CBO says reform will reduce the deficit and slow the growth of health care costs - period.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37081.html#ixzz0niEyv5IF


RELATED:

Investors

Better sit down, because you are in for a “shock”: ObamaCare will cost more than previously thought.

The Congressional Budget Office today released an analysis of discretionary spending in the law, and found that those costs will “probably exceed” $115 billion over 10 years.

At a stroke, that erases almost all of ObamaCare’s $143 billion in budget savings based off rushed, incomplete CBO projections given just before the decisive House vote in March.

Of course, that original forecast also assumed politically poisonous Medicare cuts and numerous other budget tricks. But, continuing to set those issues aside, the CBO suggests even its surplus forecast may prove ephemeral.

The new estimate includes the costs of administering the law by the IRS and the Dept. of Health and Human Services, and the cost of “future appropriations for a variety of grant and other program spending for which the act identifies the specific funding levels it envisions for one or more years.”

Yet there are other programs for which “no specific funding levels are identified in the legislation,” and the CBO couldn’t estimate the cost of those. The smart money says those costs will exceed $28 billion.

See also:

Hot Air

Of all the slime dripping from ObamaCare, from the de facto bribes to the procedural shenanigans to the Democrats’ insane demagoguery of townhall protesters, the gaming of the CBO numbers is what bothers me most. Which, in a way, is silly. When you’re talking about sums as fantastically astronomical as $940 billion, who cares what the actual pricetag is? But that’s just it: Obama pretended to care, touting the bending o’ the cost curve and demanding that the Democrats bring in a bill below the arbitrary yet politically toxic threshold of $1 trillion. And in order to make that happen, they were willing to tell any lie and pull any accounting trick that they had to, from rigging the cost window to obscure the actual $2.5 trillion pricetag to pouring the enormous costs of “doctor fix” into a separate bill so that it wouldn’t show up in the CBO data on O-Care to pushing the bill through the House before CBO was finished running the numbers. At a moment when Americans desperately need leaders to be frank with them about the cost of entitlements and what it’ll take to restore fiscal stability, Obama gave them a new entitlement built on lie after lie after lie. That’s the legacy of his signature domestic “achievement.”