Why Nobody Knows What ObamaCare Will Cost
It turns out that the costs of the Affordable Care Act — ObamaCare to its unyielding Republican foes — are sprinkled here and there through hundreds of pages of budget books. It’s partly due to the arcane ways of government budgeting. It may also be an effort to avoid giving foes more of a target.
“I’m sure somebody has a spreadsheet somewhere, but clearly they are not publishing it in this budget,” said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “There is a political aspect to this and there is literally a green-eyeshade part. Once you have adopted a policy it’s difficult to just pull it out.”
More in The Washington Post.
Why am I not surprised! When does the government ever have any idea about what something might cost!
These kinds of post make me so depressed! What are we going to do with these ballooning entitlement programs!
Well, this is not surprising at all as we all know that anything this complex cannot have a fixed price tag, which makes all the more scary.
It is going to be impossible to really know how much it’s going to cost. Costs within the industry are interconnected with external costs from connected industries.
This a common issue throughout government.. even when they pretend to know. The Federal Reserve has a study showing that over the last few decades the CBO’s forecast of future deficits 5 years ahead have been no better than a “random walk”, and overoptimistic. This page has more, and a link:
http://www.politicsdebunked.com/article-list/budget-lottery
They don’t have a good clue how much Social Security and Medicare will cost.. even without the impact of Obamacare on Medicare (which has lead Medicare to have 2 different reports, their standard one and an “alternative” one assuming Obamacare won’t lead to the rosy scenarios they claim). Their forecasts for Social Security is full of obvious flaws (e.g. their “high cost” scenario is high cost in nominal $, but if you adjust it for inflation it becomes the low cost scenario), details here:
http://www.politicsdebunked.com/article-list/ssaestimates
The proposed executive budget for Congress seems to be quite controversial and this comes to no surprise. When is Washington going to take a step back and stop creating legislation for political gain instead of for what is right for the people they represent? I suppose politics is politics anywhere you go and it’s ultimately up to the people to change the way things work at the top.
@Ryan, that may be accurate to some degree but the costs related to how tax payer’s money is channeled into the ACA is a matter of transparency and the fact that this figure is so complex and hard to get to means there are some alarming caveats for the taxpayer to worry about within the law.
There are no fixed costs to PPACA because business interest have not priced their products as of yet due to the ongoing intransegance from both sides of the isle. Republican opposition to the medicaid expansion and health exchanges and Democrats pushing the envelope on essential benefits and MLR. There are numbers coming out in July that may bring some light to the situation.
When my father lost his job, the family didn’t continue to live in the same level of middle-class extravagance. We moved to a smaller house, sold off the second car, stopped going to restaurants and the cinema. We lived within our means. I don’t understand why this concept is so bloody difficult for Congress to grasp.