• Pelosi lie exposed – real cost of Obamacare is $2 trillion over first 10 years

    by  • March 19, 2010 • All Whoppers, Congress, Featured Articles, General, Health Care, Newly Added Stories, Pelosi Whoppers • 1 Comment

    CBO_reconciliation_billYesterday I wrote about Obama’s CBO lie.  That was posted shortly before the CBO score was released on the House’s reconciliation bill.

    In that article, I outlined two major manipulations that President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have been utilizing to force the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to score the bill as costing less than one trillion dollars in the first ten years, and reducing the deficit during that same time frame.

    The ‘manipulations’ that I highlighted, along with those I didn’t, might be the greatest scam or fraud ever perpetrated on American citizens in our countries history.

    The two manipulations that I focused on were the ten years of tax revenue vs. only six years of Obamacare expenses, and Pelosi and Reid blocking all attempts to pass the Medicare ‘doctors fix’, until after the CBO scored the reconciliation bill and Obamacare is passed.

    Unfortunately, with CBS and other news agencies touting the “CBO certified” numbers and trumpeting how Obamacare will reduce the deficit, many Americans don’t understand the true cost or that the CBO summary numbers are meaningless, because of the manipulative limitations that the Democrats required the CBO to follow.

    The Weekly Standard breaks down the real cost of the bill:

    For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs.  First, it includes 2010 as the initial year.  As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time.  Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009.  But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare.  If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.

    But even that wouldn’t come close to reflecting the bill’s true costs.  The CBO projects that over the next four years, less than two percent of the bill’s alleged “ten year” costs would hit:  just $17 billion of the $940 billion in costs that the Democrats are claiming.  In fact, the costs through President Obama’s entire presidency, should he be reelected, would be $336 billion.  What would the president leave behind for his successor?  According to the CBO, he would leave behind costs of $837 billion during his successor’s first term alone.  If his successor were to serve a second term, he or she would inherit a cool $2.0 trillion in Obamacare costs — about six times its costs during Obama’s own tenure.  This legislation is a ticking time-bomb.

    To see the bill’s true first-decade costs, we need to start the clock when the costs would actually start in any meaningful way: in 2014.  The CBO says that Obamacare would cost $2.0 trillion in the bill’s real first decade (from 2014 to 2023) — and much more in the decades to come.

    But $2.0 trillion wouldn’t be the total ten-year costs.  Instead, that would merely be the “gross cost of coverage provisions.”  Based on earlier incarnations of the proposed overhaul, the total costs would be about a third higher (the exact number can’t be gleaned from the CBO’s analysis, which is only preliminary and is not a full scoring) — making the total price-tag between $2.5 and $3 trillion over the bill’s real first decade.

    How would we pay for all of this?  According to the CBO, by diverting $1.1 trillion away from already barely-solvent Medicare and spending it on Obamacare, and by increasing taxes on the American people by over $1 trillion.  Among the Medicare cuts would be cuts of $25,000 in Medicare Advantage benefits per enrollee — up from $21,000 in the previous scoring.

    That is the time based manipulation and massive cuts to Medicare.  Here is why Pelosi and Reid refused to pass a new ‘doctors fix’, even though the last one will expire on April 1st, resulting in a 21% cut in Medicare reimbursements to doctors.  All in the name of getting a good, if completely fictional, CBO score:

    We’d also pay for this through increased deficits.  Under strict instructions from the Democrats, the CBO gave Obamacare credit for over $400 billion (from 2014 to 2023) in phony “savings” that would allegedly result from cutting doctor’s payments under Medicare by over 20 percent and never raising them back up.  As the CBO notes, one of two things could happen:  Congress could either follow through on these severe pay cuts — in which case doctors would view all Medicare patients as if they have the plague — or, Congress could eliminate these pay cuts — as everyone in Washington expects to have happen under the so-called “doc fix” — in which case the CBO projects that this bill would raise deficits by over $100 billion from 2017 to 2019 alone.

    Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) appeared on Fox and Friends and explains how the CBO score and deficit reduction numbers that Pelosi and other Democrats touted yesterday have nothing to do with the real costs:

    Ed Morrissey of Hot Air comments on the IRS expansion buried in Obamacare:

    We’ve heard the double-counting argument (and it’s a good one), but the IRS expansion makes for a better, more immediate argument. Do we need the IRS checking on us every month to enforce the health-insurance mandate? Do Americans think hiring an additional 15,000 IRS agents to get even more involved in our lives is a great idea for reform?

    As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, the rumblings are growing that the Senate may not even pass the reconciliation bill.  Instead, they will simply let the House pass the current Senate bill, or should I say “deem it passed” and then refuse to take up the House reconciliation bill in the Senate.   Leaving tax payers not only with the massive increase to the deficit, but also all of the special deals the Senate bill contains.

    One Response to Pelosi lie exposed – real cost of Obamacare is $2 trillion over first 10 years

    1. Pingback: So Long Speaker Pelosi, It Was Horrible While It Lasted : Reagan's List

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