A new analysis of data from the Congressional Budget Office has provided a final cost estimate for the implementation of Obamacare over the next decade--and the results are bleak.
With the initial plan for the law's enactment, the legislation issued in March 2010 concluded that--based on its scoring conventions and assuming the law would be implemented as written, the health care provisions of the plan would have reduced the federal budget deficit by $124 billion between 2010 and 2019. In 2012, the CBO updated its 10-year estimate, saying health care would reduce the deficit by $109 billion.
Since then, the CBO has again updated its estimates to fall in line with changes in the implementation of Obamacare and its botched rollout and limited enforcement. In those estimates they discovered that instead of saving money, Obamacare will only increase the deficit.
The United States Senate Budget Committee wrote:
Altogether, the SBC Republican staff analysis finds that after taking these significant changes since 2012 into account, the Democrats’ health care law will increase the budget deficit by $131 billion over the current 10-year budget window (FY 2015–2024).
This estimate is arrived at by taking the $180 billion in projected deficit reduction from the CBO 2012 extrapolation and then accounting for the lower net cost of the coverage provisions ($83 billion), the lower estimated federal health care savings under the plan ($132 billion), as well as the lower projected revenue levels when including the labor market effects of the legislation ($262 billion).
The difference between the 2012 extrapolation and the current estimate of the cost of the Democrats’ health law amounts to a $311 billion change in its net deficit impact.
Never mind that President Obama promised this would not happen.
"I will not sign a [health care] plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future," Obama said. "I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period."