$1.6 Trillion "Sticker Shock" Price Tag

The Wall Street Journal takes on the price tag of Obamacare here and below.

One thing that is very important to remember about WSJ and other business journals is they only stay in business if their reporting is hyper-accurate because businessmen rely on their information to make corporate decisions. (Unlike the NYT which makes up stuff as it goes along.)

So when the Journal complains, you should listen.

ObamaCare Sticker Shock
A $1.6 trillion deficit boost, and the uninsured will still be with us.
This was supposed to be a red-letter week for national health care, as Democrats started the process of hustling a quarter-baked bill through Congress to reorganize one-sixth of the economy on a partisan vote. Instead it was a fiasco.

Most of the devastation was wreaked by the Congressional Budget Office, which on Tuesday reported that draft legislation from the Senate Finance Committee would increase the federal deficit by more than $1.6 trillion over the next decade while only partly denting the population of the uninsured. The details haven't been made public, but the short version seems to be that President Obama's health boondoggle prescribes vast new spending without a coherent plan to pay for it even while failing to meet its own standards for social equity.

Finance Chairman Max Baucus postponed the health timeline, probably until after Congress's July 4 vacation. His team will try to scale down the middle-class insurance subsidies and make other cuts to hold the sticker shock under $1 trillion. (Oh, is that all?) Mr. Baucus also claims he's committed to a bipartisan consensus, yet most Republicans have been closed out of the negotiations, and industry lobbyists have been pre-emptively warned that even meeting with the GOP will invite retribution.

Useful to emphasize amid the mayhem is that CBO's number-crunching is almost always off -- predicting too much spending for market-based policies and far too little for new public programs, especially on health care. The CBO score for a new entitlement is only the teaser rate, given that the costs will inevitably balloon as the years pass and more people mob "free" or subsidized insurance.