Washington Democrats have spent the past year hiding the cost of their government takeover of health care from the American people. Besides dramatic reductions in health care access, choice, and quality, the plans passed in Congress grossly mask their true dollar cost to the American people.
Speaker Pelosi has claimed the House bill costs under $900 billion, but has concealed literally trillions of dollars in spending and mandates. Here are a few things liberals are hiding that you'll have to pay for:
But there is an even bigger trick. When analyzing Hillary-care back in 1993, CBO included all health care spending in its score because the plan made all of health care essentially a government program. They concluded that the government mandates, rules, and regulations were so tight that they had to score everything.
• $135 billion in new taxes on employers who don't provide government-approved health coverageReid and Pelosi gamed the score by writing the bill in such a way that CBO would not do this with their bills. A careful reading of a CBO memo dated December 13, 2009 shows that Pelosi and Reid purposefully crafted their bills in such a way to hide the true cost from the American people. Attached below is a blog from Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute that explains the details of their multi-trillion dollar accounting gimmick. Cannon estimates that 60 percent of the cost of the bill is being hidden from the American people. If you account for all of the tricks in the Obama proposal, the cost of both the House and Senate bills would likely top $6 trillion!!! !
• $33 billion in new taxes on individuals without government-approved health coverage
• $209 billion in payments to Medicare providers
• $34 billion in increased costs to states for the Medicaid program
• An additional $727 billion to pay for the full ten year cost of the bill
Combined, these hidden expenditures bring the cost to over $2 trillion!
Bland CBO Memo, or Smoking Gun?
Michael F. Cannon
December 16, 2009 @ 8:49 am
This weekend, the Congressional Budget Office released "a very strange memo" titled, "Budgetary Treatment of Proposals to Regulate Medical Loss Ratios." You wouldn't know it from the title, but that little memo is the smoking gun that shows how congressional Democrats have very carefully hidden more than half the cost of their health care bills.
ObamaCare's Cost Could Top $6 Trillion
Michael F. Cannon
November 27, 2009 @ 10:06 pm
Congressional Democrats are using several budget gimmicks to disguise the cost of their health care overhaul, claiming the House and Senate bills would cost only (!) about $1 trillion over 10 years. Now that critics have begun to correct for those budget gimmicks, supporters of ObamaCare are firing back.
One gimmick makes the new entitlement spending appear smaller by not opening the spigot until late in the official 10-year budget window (2010-2019). Correcting for that gimmick in the Senate version, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) estimates, "When all this new spending occurs" - i.e., from 2014 through 2023 - "this bill will cost $2.5 trillion over that ten-year period."
