These Trillions are Starting to Add Up!

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) yesterday released its initial evaluation of the Democrat-sponsored "Affordable Health Choices Act." This analysis did not factor in the entire cost of the legislation, a point that the CBO director is at pains to make, as only the major provisions of the bill were evaluated.



As if the trillions of dollars already introduced into the federal deficit by Barack Hussein Muhammad bin Obama were not enough, the initial, and incomplete estimate of the CBO for this preliminary Democrat-Socialist health care legislation confirms two major points that skeptics of Obama's fantasyland health plans have been making.

* The U.S. cannot afford a major restructuring of the health care system, as the (again, preliminary) estimate is that the cost of the Democrat plan would add more than $1 trillion to existing deficits.

* That any plan such as the nationalization of health care favored by Democrats and Obama would effectively function as a disincentive for private insurance.

In other words, those who now are paying for private insurance would drop their own coverage in preference for the subsidized or free health care offered by the government. This last point undeniably indicates that the socialization of health care has very little to do with the uninsured, and rather has to do with inflicting a command-and-control economy on the United States.

The CBO director wrote on the CBO blog:

According to our preliminary assessment, enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010-2019 period. When fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million or 17 million.

In addition, the CBO frets that the total cost for social welfare/socialized health care spending is not likely encompassed even by the outrageous Democrat proposal at issue, since Democrats are also proposing an expansion of Medicaid, the fiscal consequences of which will not be known until the extent of the expansion is decided.