Forget the Highway to Hell – Updated and Bumped

With the already massive debt the Dems have added to our previous figure, they’ve got us on a set of rails to the furnace.

Some numbers courtesy of the Congressional Budget Office

The good news: 39 million people would obtain health insurance coverage through the new health insurance gateways. But the plan, according to the CBO, would result in only a net gain of 16 million Americans adding insurance. That’s because the CBO believes that the plan would kick about 15 million people out of the system because their employers would no longer offer insurance, and coverage from other sources would decline by 8 million.  The plan would add a trillion dollars to the deficit over 10 years.  An important caveat: the plan submitted to the CBO doesn’t include expanded Medicare coverage guidelines and other measures that would serve as a safety net for those whose employers stopped offering health coverage.  This version of the bill doesn’t include a “public plan,” and it does not include the so-called “pay or play” option for employers.

Oooh! A Trillion to the deficit? What that is child’s play for this Congress.

They probably see some breathing room there.

UPDATE: Did I say $1 Trillion?

Silly me, it’s now $4 Trillion!

Health Systems Innovations Network, a consulting group, went ahead and estimated the full cost of a bill that included the subsidies and Medicaid expansion, and reduced the number of uninsured by 99 percent. With these assumptions, they estimated the cost at a staggering $4 trillion over 10 years, resulting in the shift of 79 million Americans to government-run health care. The report does not include possible tax increases or spending offsets, but notes that, “this would be a challenging proposal to finance with budget neutrality.”

President Obama, in a speech to the American Medical Association on Monday, declared of the price tag of health care legislation: “it is a cost that will not – I repeat, not – add to our deficits.”

When will he realize that he is no longer campaigning and that he has to stick to what he says and that it actually matters?