This won’t surprise anyone with a pulse, but Obama, Reid, Pelosi, et al, were disingenuous about the costs of Obamacare. The Congressional Budget Office has released revised numbers and government-run healthcare will cost 8.6 percent more than what was projected in last year’s forecast. This doubtlessly is just the first of many “re-estimates” that will occur, with each one showing the program to be far more costly than initially projected.
This obviously shows the mendacity of Democrat politicians, but let’s also make sure that CBO takes a lot of the blame. The bureaucrats deliberately low-balled expenditure estimates to please their political masters. If Republicans had any brains, they would fire all of them.
Here’s a brief blurb from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial on the topic.
CBO says the entitlement’s health insurance subsidies will cost $1.13 trillion between 2012 and 2021, not $1.04 trillion, the prior estimate. This 8.6% jump is the result of revised assumptions, the so-called technical factors in CBO’s budget model. The bill’s total cost now stands at $1.445 trillion, according to another recent CBO estimate. Remember that all of these are fictitious numbers that reflect Congressional gaming of CBO conventions to make it seem as if ObamaCare “saves” money. But now, even under these conventions, CBO is conceding that it significantly underestimated the bill’s cost. If the propeller heads decide to add a few more trillion dollars in new spending, they might get somewhat closer to the bill’s true cost.
And because I like to brag when I get something right (to be fair, everyone knew the CBO numbers were dishonest and wrong, so I wasn’t exactly making a brilliant observation), I invite people to re-watch my video explaining how the politicians and their minions were lying to us.
You don’t need more than a couple of brain cells to realize that a program that says: “Medicare for all at any age so long as you add less than $60-80K to GDP” deals a serious blow to any prospect of Americans keeping their superior standard of living compared to the rest of the world. Actually it deals two knock out blows:
- The uppercut is the exorbitant direct cost from a significant proportion of the population who will long-term or even permanently modify their lives and ambitions to take advantage of the massive (10-20K per year per family) subsidies.
- The below the belt hit is the fact that people will be encouraged to either drop (or stop trying to increase) their income and/or careers (read diminish their contribution to GDP) in order to qualify and maintain the subsidies. That will kill the almost unique in the world American dream, the seminal ingredient America’s unparalleled economic success.
Then, the ever shrinking pool of people whose work will be supporting the program will be under ever increasing pressure and temptation to abandon the productive world and join the moochers. France will be perhaps the next politico-economic equilibrium point in this process and that assumes that the inevitably low motivated French somehow manage to survive the challenge posed by 3+ billion people now ascending in the emerging world.
If Medicare, i.e. unconditional top quality medical care for the last 15-20 years of one’s life, is already the major factor leading the nation towards bankruptcy, then what is a program of guaranteed top quality medical care forever and at any age going to do to public expenditures and people’s incentives to produce?
Every American would greatly benefit, or get depressed from, spending and working a few years in Europe and watch how people who, on average, have much higher competence than average Americans settle for mediocrity under the muted production incentives of the Welfare State.
But Obamacare is even more progressive and redistributionist than many European healthcare systems. In many European countries, everybody contributes to the healthcare system, the net economic effect being an across the board forced monopoly product. Under Obamacare only those who contribute less than $60-80k per year to GDP get someone else to pay for their healthcare. Well, guess what? You are going to get a lot more people contributing less than $60-80k per year to GDP. The effective marginal tax rates at the Obamacare subsidy margin are around 70-80%. How many people will maintain a desire to get over THAT marginal tax rate mountain, when, on the moocher side of the mountain one can relax into mediocrity European style?
Medicare, when enacted, had some serious opposition. Now it is bankrupting the nation, and still, less than 20% of the population supports any trimming of the program. Who really thinks that Obamacare will somehow follow a different political and electoral trajectory?
Heck, once Obamacare enables me to go into early retirement compliments of taxpayers, then even I will quit working, stop contributing to GDP, stop contributing to taxes, start draining the public purse with health subsidies at the tune of 15-20k/year… and consistently voting Democratic from that point on – though that may not be necessary since, in all likelihood , by then both parties will be supporting the sacred cow of Obamacare, just like Republicans and Democrats have now become de-facto committed to full preservation of Medicare and Social Security.
That is why 2008 WAS the endgame of American Prosperity. Now only a miracle will save Americans from descent into worldwide averagedom. Having grown up in Europe, I have seen this movie before, many-many times. Current events prove to me that the average American’s romantic support for individualism, the only economically essential factor differentiating Americans from the rest of the world, is more a result of historical coincidence rather than rational economic thought.
Unfortunately, morals aside, the noble goal of mandatory compassion inevitably leads to the cruel outcome of economic marginalization on the world stage. Americans will learn this widely taught lesson soon – over the span of about one generation – well before they even get the chance to start saving the world by diminishing climate change by 0.05C (what a joke!).
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