From the Wall Street Journal today, on the stream of bad news for President Obama’s plans to move the control of health care from private individuals to government managers:
Most of the devastation was wreaked by the Congressional Budget Office, which on Tuesday reported that draft legislation from the Senate Finance Committee would increase the federal deficit by more than $1.6 trillion over the next decade while only partly denting the population of the uninsured. The details haven’t been made public, but the short version seems to be that President Obama’s health boondoggle prescribes vast new spending without a coherent plan to pay for it even while failing to meet its own standards for social equity.
That means that the CBO predicts that Obama’s plans will cost the taxpayers an additional $160 billion per year above and beyond the outrageous deficit-financed spending that already plagues Congress. Add to this the fact that “CBO’s number-crunching is almost always off — predicting too much spending for market-based policies and far too little for new public programs.” In other words, the CBO is biased towards higher predictions for economic activity controlled by people and lower predictions for activity controlled by government.
This is to be expected. In any walk of life, when any individual or group of individuals have the responsibility of forecasting their own costs with no incentive to economize behavior, costs will always end up higher. Imagine working for a business where the traveling sales team gets to predict its own travel expenses, and then gets to coerce the accounting department to find spending after the fact because, hey, the expenses were already incurred by the business. It’s improper and unrealistic when anyone outside or inside government does it.
Can anyone, in fact, point to govenment programs which ended up costing less than predicted?
Update: Here is the Heritage Foundaton’s take on the CBO’s take on Obamacare or, at least, the current Kennedy-Dodd bill. Greg D’Angelo writes, “For all the money that the bill throws at the problem of the uninsured, there’s surprisingly little “bang for our buck.” By 2019, the increase in the deficit for each additional person covered would be more than double the cost of simply buying that person insurance on the individual market today.”
In the end, the proposal of Obama and Congressional liberals will only shift around society’s resources away from individuals and towards government, exacerbating the problems of health care in this country.
Tags: $1.6 trillion, CBO, costs, Obamacare
