Ryan Streeter
The constitutionality of ObamaCare is an open question. Given the public's dislike of the individual mandate in the law, many across America welcomed the court rulings that found the mandate unconstitutional.
But the bigger problem for ObamaCare on its 100th anniversary is the spending Jack-in-the-Box it has become. News keeps popping up that the bill is even more expensive than we thought, causing us to jerk back in startled surprise - just like a toddler who encounters a Jack-in-the-Box for the first time.
Polls are showing that Americans remain fed up with Washington's spending profligacy. Liberals had hoped that the public's anger over spending was just a November 2 thing, but it has continued apace.
This is playing into the Republicans' hands when it comes to ObamaCare.
The Wall Street Journal's editors pointed out this morning:
CBO says the entitlement's health insurance subsidies will cost $1.13 trillion between 2012 and 2021, not $1.04 trillion, the prior estimate. This 8.6% jump is the result of revised assumptions, the so-called technical factors in CBO's budget model. The bill's total cost now stands at $1.445 trillion, according to another recent CBO estimate.
This is part of the overall Jack-in-the-Box (surprise!) $2.3 trillion increase that Obama's budget adds to the deficit over the next decade, which, as the Journal's editors note, hasn't gotten much media attention (I'm quick to point out that we noticed it, and also noted that it hadn't gotten enough attention).
Fred Upton, who chairs the active House Energy & Commerce committee, writes today at Newsmax:
[Under the health care law], federal government spending on Medicaid will increase by $627 billion above current law over the next ten years, according to the latest estimates released last week by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). On top of all that, CBO also estimates the new law will spend another $777 billion to subsidize individuals receiving insurance through the new state-based “exchange” programs. Taken together, these two elements of the law — not widely discussed or known — will obligate taxpayers to almost $1.5 trillion in new government spending over the next ten years.
The Obama administration and congressional Democrats have very little by way of good news to counter this bad news about spending, which cuts so sharply against the grain of the public mood these days.
ObamaCare has become the Jack-in-the-Box that its boosters were sure it would never be. They were certain that smoothing over the new law's real budget impact would be worth it, because they were sure the public would warmly embrace the law once it was enacted.
The fact that the public never warmed to the bill makes these spending surprises deadly for the bill. As Upton says, these huge figures are "not widely discussed or known." Once they are, look out.
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