Morning Bell: Obamacare’s True Costs Coming to Light
Conn Carroll /
Remember how President Barack Obama promised that his health care plan would reduce the deficit and put us on a path towards fiscal responsibility? Remember how Congress kept gaming the system to come up with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score that could justify those claims? Well, now that Obamacare has become (hopefully only temporarily) the law of the land, the CBO is singing a slightly different tune. Last Friday CBO Director Doug Elmendorf wrote on his blog:
The central challenge is straightforward and stark: The rising costs of health care will put tremendous pressure on the federal budget during the next few decades and beyond.
In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure. In fact, CBO estimated that the health legislation will increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care (which CBO defines as the sum of net federal outlays for health programs and tax preferences for health care) by nearly $400 billion during the 2010-2019 period. Looking further ahead, CBO estimated that the legislation would reduce the federal budgetary commitment to health care in the following decade—if the provisions of the legislation remain unchanged throughout that entire period.