Just a reminder of how badly current and future taxpayers will get screwed.
Letter to Rep. Paul Ryan from CBO:
Dear Congressman:
This letter responds to several questions you have asked about the effects of an amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 4872, the Reconciliation Act of 2010, which was made public on March 18, 2010. That amendment (hereafter called “the reconciliation proposal”) represents one component of the health care legislation being considered by the Congress; the other component is a bill, H.R. 3590, that the Senate passed in December. The analysis provided in this letter is based on the preliminary estimate of the direct spending and revenue effects of that amendment that was prepared by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT).1The Combined Budgetary Impact of Enacting the Reconciliation Proposal, H.R. 3590, and H.R. 3961
You asked about the total budgetary impact of enacting the reconciliation proposal (the amendment to H.R. 4872), the Senate-passed health bill (H.R. 3590), and the Medicare Physicians Payment Reform Act of 2009 (H.R. 3961). CBO estimates that enacting all three pieces of legislation would add $59 billion to budget deficits over the 2010–2019 period.
Under current law, Medicare’s payment rates for physicians’ services will be reduced by about 21 percent in April 2010 and by an average of about 2 percent per year for the rest of the decade. H.R. 3961 would increase those payment rates by 1.2 percent in 2010 and would restructure the sustainable growth rate mechanism beginning in 2011. Those changes would result in significantly higher payment rates for physicians than those that would result under current law. CBO estimates that enacting H.R. 3961, by itself, would cost about $208 billion over the 2010–2019 period. (That estimate reflects the enactment of two short-term extension acts, which lowered the cost in 2010 by about $2 billion compared with CBO’s estimate of November 4, 2009).
……CBO estimates that enacting H.R. 3961 together with those two bills would add $59 billion to budget deficits over the 2010–2019 period. That amount is about $10 billion less than the figure that would result from summing the effects of enacting the bills separately. The $10 billion difference occurs primarily because H.R. 3590 and the reconciliation proposal would modify how the government’s payments to Medicare Advantage plans are set.
The rest here: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/113xx/doc11376/RyanLtrhr4872.pdf
The total ObamaCare package will add billions to the already bloated deficit.
All if the numbers don’t jump out at you right away, because as Allahpundit points out:
How do you slap a $940 billion pricetag on what’s actually a multitrillion-dollar bill? Well, as we’ve seen, the first thing you do is make sure not to start the program until almost halfway through CBO’s window of time for measuring how much it’ll cost. That cuts a trillion or two right off the top. But what if that still leaves you with budget deficits, thus crippling your sub-moronic talking point about how this massive new federal entitlement will save money over time?
Simple. You break the bill up and pass one of the expensive parts separately later.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/19/cbo-confirms-obamacare-with-doctor-fix-will-actually-add-billions-to-the-deficit/
That’s how the Dems obscure the costs; with smoke and mirrors. Pass the bills one at a time, knowing that the accumulated damage will catch up later. In the meantime, they can sell a line of bullshit about how they’re “reducing” the deficit and “making health care affordable”. Unless this catastrophe is repealed, it will take effect in 2014. After that, the full impact of this socialist trainwreck will destroy what’s left of a once-great health care system.