Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 9:51:40 PM
The Congressional Budget Office has tried crunching the numbers on
Barack Obama’s plan to reform health care, which Obama says will save
money and protect the uninsured. The CBO director on his official blog
says, “Wrong!” — on both counts. The reform plan will cost more than a
trillion dollars over the next decade, and while it will put 39 million
people on insurance plans, it will drive off more than 23 million more
from their existing plans. The cost doesn’t include Obama’s public
plan option, either
A net decrease of 16-17 million would still leave about 30 million
uninsured, according to the figures thrown around by ObamaCare
advocates. It would simply exchange individuals in the uninsured
category, and those most likely to lose their coverage would be those
in lower-income jobs, as well as people working in small businesses and
startups.
We would spend a trillion dollars to achieve a net result of solving
a third of the uninsured problem. We could have exceeded that by
simply paying for private insurance. Assuming an annual cost of $5,000
for basic catastrophic and wellness coverage, we could purchase 20
million plans for the ten years, without overhauling the rest of the
American health-care system.
But that would be akin to the “public plan,” which the
trillion-dollar CBO cost estimate doesn’t cover. The inclusion of
such a plan would remove the incentive for employers to offer insurance
at all, which would create many millions more uninsured. At the same
time, the public plan would undercut private insurers in the individual
markets, pushing people who got kicked out of an employer group plan
towards the Medicare-like coverage — and accomplishing single payer by
default.
What would be the real cost of ObamaCare? Well north of a
trillion dollars. We’ll see if the CBO updates the figures with the
analysis of the dynamic impact of the public plan in the coming days,
or whether the CBO gets suddenly quiet about it.