Congress: “Health Care Will Cost… We Don’t Know… $930 Billion?”
The Congressional Budget Office has thrown its hat into the ring of speculation and estimated how much health care reform might very well cost. After nearly a month of writing random numbers on slips of paper and picking them out of a bag, the CBO has decided the total cost of the health care reform package will be $930 billion over the next ten years. After picking out the next set of numbers completely in absence of data or evidence, the office has conjectured that the bill will actually serve to reduce the deficit by $1.3 trillion over that same period.
This report is only the latest in what seem to be totally arbitrary divinations as to what health care might actually cost us over the next decate. Depending on whether you ask republicans or democrats, the reform bill will either reduce the deficit significantly by cutting inefficiencies in the system… or it will cost us out firstborn child, our national security, and our fleeting edge over the communists. Even independent groups have suggested that pending legislation will either cost us $200 billion, $850 billion, it might save us $1.3 trillion, or final expenditures might end up somewhere in between any of these. Considering how drastically these figures coming from supposedly respectable groups differ from one another, we might as well assume they have been taking turns blindfolding one another and throwing darts at numbered balloons. Who pays these people? [Washington Post]
-Michael B. Sauter
[...] budget office suggests the measures will save us billions, estimates for the final cost have been all over the place. Regardless of how much we finally save, the government is still going to spend billions of dollars [...]