In what is certainly the most surprising news of the day, the Congressional Budget Office has revised its estimates of the cost of the PPACA, the healthcare reform bill, upwards:
Congressional Budget Office estimates released Tuesday predict the health care overhaul will likely cost about $115 billion more in discretionary spending over ten years than the original cost projections.
The additional spending — if approved over the years by Congress — would bring the total estimated cost of the overhaul to about $1 trillion.
The Congressional Budget Office expects the federal agencies to spend $10 billion to $20 billion over 10 years on administrative costs to implement the overhaul. The CBO expects Congress to spend an additional $105 billion over 10 years to fund discretionary programs in the overhaul.
It would be an astonishing stroke of luck if that is the last upwards revision in costs that we see in this bill. I’m guessing that the estimates will fall short by just shy of an order of magnitude when all is said and done.
Here’s the statement from the horse’s mouth:
CBO estimates that total authorized costs in the first two categories [ed. federal agency administrative cost increases and explicit authorizations for future appropriations for which the bill already identifies funding levels] probably exceed $115 billion over the 2010-2019 period. We do not have an estimate of the potential costs of authorizations in the third category [ed. explicit authorizations for future appropriations for which the bill specifies no funding levels].
Awfully vague statement on where the money is going. Will look for more later. My first guess would be the high risk pools and Medicaid.
Steve
Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.
Note that about 80% of this spending would have been done with or without the new health bill.
While we’re at it, let’s add the cost of extending the AMT to PPACA.
In an effort to save a system that is out of control and unsustainable, we rejected the system that was probably the answer to the problem; single payer health care.
Isn’t it inevitable? Why do things have to be broken more, to get the very last drop of blood from a stone, in order to do the logical and right thing?