Start Printing That Money

Well--here's a shocker. The fiscally responsible "health care for all" bill is going to cost a few pennies more than the Obama administration told us it would. It seems that the doctored facts the Obamists gave the Congressional Budget Office resulted in a slight early cost overrun. A slight $115 billion to be exact.

Prior to the release of the latest CBO revision, and after people were already recovering from the shock of the health care bill passing in the first place, at least one poll shows that the public opposes the bill by 49% to 43%. Wait 'til they get a load of these figures. The bill that wasn't going to cost us a penny extra in taxes, and would provide Rolls Royce level health insurance at Ford Escort prices is turning out to be a Yugo with the price tag of a Bugatti.

The original estimate, as well as this one, was produced based on what the politicians tell the CBO (and significantly, what they don't tell them). This is the same CBO that underestimated the original cost of Medicare by a factor of nine. I can't wait until Nancy Pelosi and the other Spendocrats actually read the bill that they've passed so we can get even more upgraded estimates. We're already back to the approximately $1.3 trillion that the optimistic Republicans originally estimated, and haven't come close to adding in the costs for those extra little items that nobody has "discovered" yet.

Republicans are predictably pouncing on this first of many announcements that the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats "fudged" the figures. And equally predictably, the Democrats are denying the facts. The numbers will go up next when the CBO is given the figures for the 38 sections of grants built in to the bill. So far, the CBO has been given the facts about the increased costs for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the IRS. Those alone are going to cost about $20 billion. There are already between $90 billion and $105 billion in authorized but unfunded programs.

The Democrats seem blissfully unaware of the facts and in denial about the costs. An unnamed Democratic leadership aide on Capitol Hill said the Congress will stay within the budget. "Just like other authorized programs, the discretionary programs in health reform will need to compete for funds within set budgetary limits. Republicans fighting to repeal reform can say what they want, but the bottom line is that CBO says reform will reduce the deficit and slow the growth of health care costs--period." I would remind the aide that he is citing the CBO which based that pie-in-the-sky statement purely on lies presented to them by the Democrats. Bad accounting based on false assumptions.

And that is the great and ongoing liberal/progressive Democratic lie. These authorizations will have to "compete" with all the other big-spending bills and entitlements already created by the left. Is this idiot actually suggesting that the Democrats will ever cut a dime from their socialist programs already in place or about to be proposed? And then we are supposed to believe, as the aide says, that "the President has called for a non-security discretionary spending freeze, and he will enforce it with his veto pen."

If you believe that, I've got this big orange bridge I'll sell you. To Obama, "discretionary" means nothing. Every government program of whatever nature and for whatever purpose is absolutely necessary in the mind of the statist president. Federally mandated midnight basketball is going to look like common sense when this fool and his disciples get finished with us. Obama doesn't own a veto pen. His only pen is the one he uses to sign America into oblivion.