The Projected Cost Of Obamacare

By Author: Norris Rios
Total Articles: 572
Comment this article

Since the last elections, the continuing political story has been about the deficit. The more strictly conservative representatives have come to Washington with what they claim is a mandate to slash government spending so that the deficit can be reduced. This is producing an unhelpful form of brinkmanship in which the parties and the President decide whether to compromise or close down the government. It seems the main political players prefer to put their own doctrinaire beliefs ahead of the interests of the electorate since it helps no one if the government does in fact shut down.

While all this posturing has been going on, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has produced a revised estimate of how much the "Affordable" Care Act is to cost. The first guess of just over one trillion dollars spent in the first ten years was produced twelve months ago. It now seems it will cost an additional $40 billion. It should not surprise us that the costs are projected to rise. The Senate Economic Committee published a report in 2009 charting Washington's track record in estimating how much different projects would cost. As an example, ...
... the House Committee of Ways and Means guessed the cost of Medicare would rise to about $12 billion in 1990. The reality was rather different with the cost being $110 billion. There have been other examples where estimates have been out by multiples of up to twenty. This is not evidence of incompetence or malpractice. It simply reflects the difficulty of assessing what will be involved when the real work begins.

It's surprising the CBO's latest estimate has not received more coverage. The politicians are grandstanding over whether Obamacare should be repealed without worrying how much it's going to cost to implement and run it. This is a short-sighted approach. None of the cases working their way through the courts will arrive at the Supreme Court this year. Until there's a positive ruling Obamacare is unconstitutional, whether in whole or part, the law is in force. Hence, both federal government and the individual states are already spending money to implement the provisions.

Given the preoccupation with the deficit, the GOP's plan to throw away every dollar being spent on implementation when the Supreme Court rules is unhelpful. We should ensure every dollar spent by Washington is spent to good purpose no matter what happens in the Supreme Court. We need the best value for money out of the law as it stands. It's a shame that politics so often has nothing to do with common sense, but everything to do with emotion even though that might produce absurd results. When so many people in America live without the benefit of an active health insurance policy, we should all be working on ways to change that for the better. Particularly when so many children and young adults are without cover, and the general level of health is declining, everything possible should be done to bring the estimated 50 million people without health insurance into a program that will offer preventative medicine and improved standards of care at an early stage in the development of a disease or disorder. Waiting for an emergency makes it worse for everyone.