Do you remember when Congress passed the Medicare prescription drug benefit back in 2004? Taxpayers were told the 10-year cost of the benefit would be “only” $400 billion. But soon after the benefit passed, its estimated price tag rose to more than $700 billion.
In fact, there is a long history of Washington’s predictions of the cost of entitlements being far lower than what those entitlements actually wind up costing.
Now, the same thing is happening with ObamaCare socialized medicine, which Congress passed with only Democrat votes a couple of months ago.
Shortly before the vote, the Congressional Budget Office estimated ObamaCare would cost “only” $940 billion. Now that ObamaCare is the law of the land, the CBO has revised its estimate upward. It says ObamaCare may wind up costing $115 billion more than first predicted — well over the $1 trillion mark — if all the spending it authorizes is approved.
The CBO said that money would cover “administrative costs,” as well as community health centers and medical care for American Indians. The CBO resisted including those expenses in earlier estimates despite objections by Republicans that the American people were not getting the full picture of how much ObamaCare will cost.
Of course, the big problem is that our nation cannot afford even the $940 billion original estimate, much less an additional $115 billion surcharge. And even the best minds at the CBO cannot really know what all the ultimate costs will be in a health reform law that runs thousands of pages and that most lawmakers probably never even read.
With a $12.9 trillion national debt, the United States is drowning in red-ink spending. But we are swimming even farther from the shore of fiscal responsibility.