You'll never believe this, but it's true: Obamacare is not going to save money. It's actually going to cost money—a lot of it.
I know, it's crazy, isn't it?
In retrospect, just about every part of the Obamacare fight now seems unbelievable: How the law was basically written by committee. The reckless, brazen way in which it was passed. The total lack of passion for it, not just among voters but even among most of the Democrats who voted for it.
(I've always thought that, in a strange way, the passage of Obamacare was an extraordinary display of political power on the part of President Obama. It's one thing for a president to convince his party-mates to walk the plank for an unpopular vote. It's another to force them to do it for a vote they don't believe in. But it's an entirely different matter to get them to commit suicide for an unpopular vote that they don't believe in—and that you don't believe in, either. It would have earned a tip of the cap from LBJ.)
And the total lack of honesty about the costs of the thing. Democrats knew that Obamacare was going to end up costing a lot of money. Voters knew that it would, too. And—this is the strange part—Democrats knew that voters knew.
So why the elaborate charade with double-counting and magical projections? My own theory is that this was the rare moment where the politicians weren't trying to delude the voters. They were trying to delude themselves. Democrats went through the Obamacare budget kabuki because they were trying to talk themselves into voting for it.
Otherwise, they could have simply said: Hey, our healthcare system stinks. We're going to reform it. It'll cost money. But you get what you pay for in life and we believe that, in ten years, you'll thank us for fixing it.
But that sort of messaging was never part of the argument for Obamacare. Instead, Democrats tried to sell it as a cost savings.
Well, now it turns out that over the next ten years, Obamacare is likely to cost $1,160 billion. And add $340 billion to the federal deficit.
It may not be a surprise. But it should be an outrage.
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