Morning Bell: The House’s Hidden Health Care Train Wreck

Conn Carroll / July 15, 2009

Yesterday, House Democrats unveiled their much-anticipated health care plan— the same day that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary scoring of the bill putting a $1.3 trillion price tag on the effort. Weighing in at 1,018 pages, that comes to $1.264 billion per page. But even this analysis understates the true costs of the bill. The CBO only scores bills on a ten-year time frame, and House Democrats have designed their bill to obscure the catastrophic long-term fiscal path on which it places our country.

This Monday, President Barack Obama met with Blue Dog Democrats and assured them health reform would produce savings “beyond the 10-year budget window.” Every objective piece of independent evidence thoroughly contradicts this claim. According to the CBO, the cost for the first four years is just $74 billion, but then it accelerates sharply. By 2019, the new entitlement is set to cost American taxpayers $254 billion. So while many Americans may look at the $1.3 trillion price tag over ten years and conclude the plan will cost $130 billion a year, in reality it will cost nearly double that. By backloading all the spending, the House is hiding the true cost of their plan from the American people. Between 2018 and 2019, federal costs for the new entitlement and the enlargement of Medicaid would increase by a combined 8.9%.

The House bill does nothing to control these exploding costs. But this shouldn’t be a surprise. CBO Director Doug Elmendorf has repeatedly told Congress that expanding coverage without more fundamental reform of Medicare “puts an additional long-term burden on top of an already unsustainable path.” (more…)