GAO Report Finds Obamacare Likely to Add $6.2 Trillion to the Deficit

Two girls pose for a picture with a cardboard cut-out of US President Barack Obama in a tent defending 'Obamacare' at a street fair in Charlotte, North Carolina, September 3, 2012. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

A recent analysis by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that President Obama's health care overhaul is likely to add $6.2 trillion to the deficit over the next 75 years.

It is just the latest report to contradict President Obama's repeated claims that the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as "Obamacare," will not add "one dime" to the deficit and is in fact the fiscally responsible decision.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the Senate Budget Committee's top Republican, requested the report from the GAO and discussed its findings Tuesday.

"The results of this brand new report confirm everything critics and Republicans were saying about the cost of this bill, and reveal the dramatic falsehoods that were used to push it to passage," he stated.

After highlighting President Obama's pledge that he would "not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future. Period," Sessions continued: "The GAO's investigation reveals these claims to be false."

"According to the GAO, with a realistic set of assumptions, the health care law will increase the deficit by seven tenths of 1% of GDP, or roughly $6.2 trillion over the next 75 years," he said.  "In other words, the GAO reveals that the big tax increases in the bill come nowhere close to covering the even more massive spending."

National Review has a copy of the GAO report and Sessions' remarks:

While many studies thus far have focused on a ten-year projection, which includes several years of extra taxes before the program is actually implemented, the GAO attempted to look decades into the future, factoring in an aging population, economic growth, and the mandatory spending that would come with more people getting their health care through the government.

They didn't decisively determine that the debt would increase by $6.2 trillion, but said much of it hinges on total enrollment in government programs, whether cost-containment measures are sustained, and whether excess costs can be trimmed.

The GAO didn't seem optimistic, however.  Here's what they had to say in their findings:

(Photo: Government Accountability Office via National Review)

According to the Hill, Democrats are countering claims that Obamacare increases the deficit by citing a report from the Congressional Budget Office that says, at this point, overturning the law will cost $109 billion over ten years.

Either way, one of Sessions' points seems clear: "The big-government crowd in Washington manipulated the numbers to get the financial score they wanted, to get their bill passed and to increase their power and influence."

(H/T: National Review)

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