Obamacare: Taxpayers in the Hole for $1.5 Trillion
...Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of the people most responsible for forcing Obamacare through Congress in 2010, has another theory. When challenged on the latest delay in the rollout, Reid responded that it was necessary because “people are not educated about how to use the Internet.” ...
...All of that doesn’t begin to address the supposedly “fierce urgency of now” that demanded a top-down, command-economy government program to deal with the estimated 40 million Americans without insurance who should have flooded the system looking for coverage.
If this system works as well as the Obama administration insists, where are all of the uninsured? Why haven’t we seen massive numbers of enrollments from the beginning if that was such a crisis as to require the kind of intervention Democrats imposed, at an estimated cost of $1.5 trillion dollars over the next ten years? ...
Updated Estimates of the Insurance Coverage Provisions of the Affordable Care Act
...In the current interim projections, CBO and JCT estimate that the ACA’s coverage provisions will result in a net cost to the federal government of $41 billion in 2014 and $1,487 billion over the 2015–2024 period. (All of the dollar amounts discussed here are for federal fiscal years, which run from October 1 through September 30.) Compared with last year’s projections, which spanned the 2014–2023 period, the new estimate represents a downward revision of $9 billion in the net costs of those provisions over that 10-year period. (That revision is discussed in more detail in the last section.)
The estimated net costs in 2014 stem almost entirely from spending for subsidies that will be provided through exchanges and from an increase in spending for Medicaid. For the 2015–2024 period, the projected net costs consist of the following:
Gross costs of $2,004 billion for Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), subsidies and related spending for insurance obtained through exchanges, and tax credits for small employers; and
Receipts of $517 billion from penalties on certain uninsured people and certain employers, an excise tax on high-premium insurance plans, and other budgetary effects—mostly increases in tax revenues....
