CBO: Obamacare in its First Decade Will Cost Double What the President Promised

It seems like with every new report, Obamacare just gets better and better.

Here’s the latest [from the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein]:

When President Obama was selling his health care legislation to Congress, he declared that “the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.”

But with the law’s major provisions set to kick in next year, a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office projects that the law will cost double that, or $1.8 trillion.

That’s trillion with a “T.”*

Klein continues:

What accounts for the dramatic difference? It’s true that at the time of passage, the CBO said the gross cost of the law’s provisions to expand insurance coverage would be $940 billion over a decade.

But as many critics of the health care law pointed out at the time, this number was deceptive because it estimated spending from 2010 through 2019 even though the program's major spending provisions weren’t scheduled to go into effect until 2014. Effectively, the original estimate measured the cost of six years of Obamacare instead of 10.

The CBO’s trillion dollar projection accounts for fiscal years 2014-2023, the first full decade of Obamacare:

But wait! That's not all!

“CBO now expects the Medicaid expansion to cover an additional 13 million people by 2023 (up 1 million from its February estimate) and the new government-run insurance exchanges to cover 24 million (1 million fewer than previously projected) [emphasis added],” Klein writes.

“CBO estimates that under Obamacare, 7 million fewer people in the United States will have employment-based insurance by 2023,” he adds.

Meanwhile, the White House’s twitter account reminded everyone on Thursday that the president's health care overhaul is, in fact, the law of the land:

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*That rhymes with "P" and that stands for pool.