Congressional supporters of ObamaCare used deception of the most brazen sort two years ago to get the bill passed -- exclusively by Democrats -- and to hide its true cost.
Now that cost can no longer be entirely concealed by accounting tricks, and it is mind-boggling.
Here is how Democrats in Congress and President Barack Obama initially managed to make it seem as if ObamaCare would cost "only" about $940 billion over 10 years and would "reduce deficits" and health care spending: They delayed implementing many of its priciest provisions until 2014. So when the Congressional Budget Office projected the costs from 2010-2019, only six of those years included the full range of spending the law entails.
That created rosy but entirely phony estimates.
Now, the CBO has projected the 10-year cost of ObamaCare with more years of its actual spending in place -- through 2022 -- and the sky-high estimate is more or less what opponents of ObamaCare warned again and again before it became law.
ObamaCare will not cost the $940 billion that was estimated back when it became law. Rather, according to the CBO, it will cost $1.76 trillion!
And even that doesn't include quite a full 10 years of ObamaCare's costs, so the true price tag for an entire decade is likely to be around $2 trillion. That would be more than double the original claims about the law's cost.
Other projections by the CBO regarding this "reform" are equally alarming.
"[W]e were told time and again during the health care debate that the law didn't represent a government takeover of health care," writes Philip Klein of The Washington Examiner. "But by 2022, according to the CBO, 3 million fewer people will have health insurance through their employer, while 17 million Americans will be added to Medicaid and 22 million will be getting coverage through government-run exchanges."
There is no way around it: America was sold a bill of goods with ObamaCare. It imperils our economic future every day that it remains on the books.
We hope the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn it this year in response to lawsuits by a majority of the states. Barring that, we hope Obama is defeated in November and that enough of the Democrats who voted for ObamaCare are voted out of office so that Congress can repeal this awful law.