the tindog coffeehouse

Forget any talk about rationing or “death panels” or whether the government is gonna rifle through your wallet before deciding whether you’re worth saving.  That’s irrelevant.  You want a simple answer as to why ObamaCare is bad for America?

We can’t afford it.

Wednesday night President Obama claimed that his health care plan would (only) cost $900,000,000,000 over 10 years while not increasing budget deficits.

In the words of Congressman Joe Wilson, “You lie!”

The Congressional Budget Office’s initial estimate of the cost of Senator Ted Kennedy’s health care plan estimated that it would cost about $1.3 trillion over 10 years and still leave 37 million people uninsured.  The CBO also noted that the House plan would increase the deficit by $239 billion over that same 10-year time period.  And then from 2019 to 2029, the CBO says, spending would increase by 8% while revenue would only increase by 5%, creating even larger deficits over time.

Further, writes Martin Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan:

The House health-care bill gives a large subsidy to millions of families with incomes up to three times the poverty level (i.e., up to $66,000 now for a family of four) if they buy their insurance through one of the newly created “insurance exchanges,” but not if they get their insurance from their employer. The CBO’s cost estimate understates the number who would receive the subsidy because it ignores the incentive for many firms to drop employer-provided coverage. It also ignores the strong incentive that individuals would have to reduce reportable cash incomes to qualify for higher subsidy rates. The total cost of ObamaCare over the next decade likely would be closer to $2 trillion than to $1 trillion.

The administration’s claim that the health-care plan would be “self-financing” is both false and irrelevant. It is false because it would only be self-financing if one counts a variety of President Obama’s proposed tax increases—and even those would produce much less revenue than is assumed in the budget calculations. The claim is irrelevant because those tax increases have nothing to do with health care and could be used instead to reduce other projected deficits.

(Emphasis mine.)

(Ah, remember the good ol’ days when $700 billion seemed like a lot of money?)

So forget debating about whether the government is gonna kick grandma to the curb because she’s too old to treat or whether the public option covers illegal immigrants.  The simple reality of President Obama’s health care plan is that it is too expensive.

Period.