Sadly, this isn't exactly shocking, merely dismaying:
President Obama's national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projection released today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law.
Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO's standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama's pledge that the legislation would cost "around $900 billion over 10 years." When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.
Today, the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and the results are as critics expected: the ten-year cost of the law's core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now ballooned to $1.76 trillion. That's because we now have estimates for Obamacare's first nine years of full implementation, rather than the mere six when it was signed into law.
They wanted their damn health care law no matter what, so let's not talk about "accounting tricks." They lied so blatantly it wasn't even worth it for them to pretend the weren't lying. This monstrosity can either die slowly, bleeding us more every day it stays alive, or the Supreme Court can kill it all at once. It's said that the justices shouldn't follow the headlines, but we all know they are sometimes influenced by current events. Let's hope they're paying attention now.
