Even before this particular find, costs for the implementation of ObamaCare were shown to be higher than doing nothing. Now we learn that in addition to that, there’s an additional $50 billion a year cost that will come due:
Federal payments required by President Barack Obama’s health care law are being understated by as much as $50 billion per year because official budget forecasts ignore the cost of insuring many employees’ spouses and children, according to a new analysis. The result could cost the U.S. Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars during the first ten years of the new health care law’s implementation.
“The Congressional Budget Office has never done a cost-estimate of this [because] they were expressly told to do their modeling on single [person] coverage,” said Richard Burkhauser in a telephone interview Monday. Burkhauser is an economist who teaches in Cornell University’s department of policy analysis and management. On Monday the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper on the subject that Burkhauser co-authored with colleagues from Cornell and Indiana University.
Employees and employers can use the rules to their own advantage, he said. “A very large number of workers” will be able to apply for federal subsidies, “dramatically increasing the cost” of the law, he said.
I’m sure that will come as an “unexpected” surprise to those who preached the entire point of implementing ObamaCare was to “bend the cost curve down”. Now it appears it will not only fail to do that, but instead bend that curve upward.
Bottom line:
In May a congressional committee set the accounting rules that determine who will qualify for federal health care subsidies under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. When the committee handed down the rules to the Congressional Budget Office, its formula excluded the health care costs of millions of workers’ spouses and children. The result was a final estimate for 2010 that hides those costs.
“This is a very important paper,” Heritage Foundation health care expert Paul Winfree told TheDC. These hidden costs, he said, “will almost certainly add to the deficit, contrary to what the Congressional Budget Office and others have estimated.”
Your incompetent and clueless government at work.
And we wonder why we have such an outrageous deficit and debt problem?
Josie Salinas on August 11, 2011 at 4:14 pm said:
I can’t count how many people told me that the CBO scored that bill as being revenue-neutral or better, and how many times I had to explain that “no, they score the bill the way they are told to score it–not according to what they think will really happen, in the real world”!