CBO: It’s Not Possible to Analyze Obamacare Costs

Americans may never get an accurate projection of Obamacare’s impact on the deficit, reports the Washington Examiner.

Before it become law, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that Obamacare would cost $938 billion and reduce the deficit by $143 billion over the first decade, from 2010 through 2019. At that time, the figures were already questionable.

Since that original estimate, the CBO’s financial projections have continued to change:

– In July 2012, the CBO reduced its estimate of the law’s impact on the budget deficit to $109 billion.
– In April 2014, the CBO said that the cost of the ACA from 2015 to 2024 would be more than $1.8 trillion — twice as much as its first ten-year projection.

In that same April report, the CBO include a significant footnote: “CBO and (the Joint Committee on Taxation) can no longer determine exactly how the provisions of the (Affordable Care Act) that are not related to the expansion of health insurance coverage have affected their projections of direct spending and revenues… Isolating the incremental effects of those provisions on previously existing programs and revenues four years after enactment of the ACA is not possible.”

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