Obamacare Costs Almost Doubles!

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released a new report that showed a new projection for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (aka Obamacare). Instead of the program costing $900 billion over 10 years, it will now cost the American taxpayers $1.76 TRILLION.

In order to get this bill through Congress, Democrats used many accounting tricks to ram this bill through including the most egregious which delayed full implementation of the law until 2014. This trick was used to get around the standard ten-year budget window used by the CBO. This accounting "sleight of hand" made the program cheaper and met Obama's pledge to keep costs around "$900 billion over 10 years".

In the CBO's own report, it states the following.

Those amounts do not encompass all of the budgetary impacts of the ACA because that legislation has many other provisions, including some that will cause significant reductions in Medicare spending and others that will generate added tax revenues, relative to what would have occurred under prior law.

The cost of this program could continue to rise or Congress could act to make "significant reductions in Medicare spending" to fund Obamacare.


On September 9, 2009, President Obama said this to the Joint Session of Congress and the American people.

Now, add it all up, and the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years -- less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration. (Applause.) Now, most of these costs will be paid for with money already being spent -- but spent badly -- in the existing health care system. The plan will not add to our deficit. The middle class will realize greater security, not higher taxes. And if we are able to slow the growth of health care costs by just one-tenth of 1 percent each year -- one-tenth of 1 percent -- it will actually reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the long term.

Nancy Pelosi was absolutely correct. We had to pass it to see what was in it. As we continue to watch as Obamacare continues its implementation, we will soon find out that the cost will far outweigh any benefit and that other programs like Medicare will suffer for it.

For the full report, click here.

For President Obama's full speech to a Joint Session of Congress on health care, click here.