The
Daily Signal
Surprise!
The Government Now Can’t Even Guess How Much Obamacare Ultimately
Will Cost
Genevieve
Wood
June
06, 2014
It’s
no secret Obamacare is unaffordable. But now we also know that even
the Congressional Budget Office can’t predict how much more this
disastrous law will cost.
According
to a footnote from a Congressional Budget Office report released in
April but reported this week by Roll Call, the law’s true costs and
long-term fiscal impact are simply impossible to track.
That’s
a change in tune for the CBO, which originally reported in 2010 that
Obamacare would pay for itself and over the course of a decade would
decrease the deficit.
So
what’s changed?
Well,
thanks to the constant modifications to the law, the only thing
predictable about Obamacare’s provisions is that they’re
unpredictable.
Many
of the “savings” and “revenue” (read: mandates and tax
increases) originally proposed to pay for this redesign of one-sixth
of the U.S. economy, whether Medicare cuts or employer mandates, have
been waived, stalled or simply not implemented, making a defensible
revised forecast impossible. The changes occurred because it became
clear such measures were both politically unpopular and realistically
unaffordable.
There
are other reasons that it’s virtually impossible to even guess how
much Obamacare will ultimately cost.
We
learned this week that more than 2 million people—a whopping
quarter of those enrolled in Obamacare—who signed up for insurance
via Obamacare’s health care exchanges have discrepancies in their
records and paperwork.
Apparently
the government has inaccurate or inadequate information regarding the
income levels of more than 1 million people who signed up and can’t
verify the immigration or citizenship status for more than 900,000.
That means some current enrollees may not be eligible for Obamacare
subsidies and may lose their coverage or may have been given too
generous a subsidy and eventually will have to pay the government
back.
Serco,
Inc., a government contractor hired to track down and verify the
missing information, released a statement saying, “Current system
access and functionality … limits the ability to resolve
outstanding inconsistencies.”
That
means the government’s website again was not up to par and much of
the work to resolve the data discrepancies will require hands-on work
to figure out who among these 2 million people should be getting
insurance and subsidies through the exchange and who should not. In
other words, there will need to be a significant number of extra
staffers brought onto fix this mess.
Guess
the Obama administration finally is delivering on those “job
creation” promises—too bad it’s at the taxpayers’ expense.
Not
all the bad news regarding the spending train wreck that is Obamacare
emanates from Washington. Many of the states that chose to set up
their own exchanges spent hundreds of millions of federal dollars to
do so—and yet ended up with exchanges that don’t work.
As we
approach the next enrollment period in November, lawmakers in those
states are frantically trying to figure out whether they can get more
dollars from Washington to fix their problems or if they are going to
have to use their own state funds. State Rep. John Delaney, a
Democrat in Maryland, worries his state will have to divert dollars
from education, fixing potholes and other programs to address its
broken exchange. “You can’t just print money in the states,” he
said.
That’s
right. But the printing presses in Washington have been overused for
some time as well—and states that gladly jumped on the Obamacare
bandwagon and took the bait shouldn’t be let off the hook by
Congress.
So to
sum up, the CBO can’t calculate Obamacare’s future costs,
confusion about enrollees’ actual salaries could lead to wildly
varying numbers on how much it costs this year, and there’s no
telling how much money some states ultimately will weasel out of
Washington to set up Obamacare.
Talk
about a monstrosity of a government program.
What
we do know for sure is that Obamacare will cost far more than
President Obama and all those who voted for it in Congress told us it
would. Which most of us realized all along.
Read
this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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