Health Care Quote of the Day

Ok, this is kinda long to be called a "quote," but I think it sums up quite well the absurdity of the cost projections for the ObamaCare monstrosity that passed the House late last night:

Maybe the bill passed by the House on Saturday night will stay within its cost projections. Of course, you have several cost projections to choose from. The Democrats’ cost claims are all ridiculous lies, designed using accounting techniques that would land private businessmen in jail, just in time to save them from being drawn and quartered by stockholders. The Heritage Foundation’s estimate of $2.4 to $2.6 trillion over 10 years, beginning when the House bill transitions from front-loaded tax hikes to full Daffy Duck freak-out spending in 2014, is the most logical projection of its true costs I’ve seen.

Even this will likely prove to be an underestimation of the true long-term costs. No other Big Government program has ever stayed within an order of magnitude of the promises made when it was signed into law. Medicare originally cost about $3 billion, when it began in 1965, and was projected to cost about $12 billion by 1990, adjusted for inflation. The actual cost in 1990 was nearly ten times that figure, $107 billion. It was up to $440 billion by 2007. The architects of the program would have been run out of town on a rail, if these future costs had been known to the voters of 1965.

The difference between promised benefits and expected revenues for Social Security and Medicare amounts to about $107 trillion dollars, which Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute points out is double the annual Gross Domestic Product of the entire world. The most strident opponent of the New Deal would never have dreamed of predicting this level of cost overrun. Name any government program that has been around for more than five years, and the odds are good it costs at least triple what its opponents originally said it would cost.

In other words, whatever budget number the President, the CBO, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid or even John Boehner give you for ObamaCare, it's wrong.  Exponentially wrong.  So when the folks in DC start arguing over a few billions of deficit here or there, just stop listening because it's going to be a lot worse than even the worst of the projections.  It always is.  Always.

Read the whole thing here.