The $2.6 Trillion Health Care Plan

Don’t buy the claims that the ObamaCare bill will be deficit neutral. Don’t even trust the claim that it will result in increased spending of only $343 billion. And you can completely ignore the fiction that this bill will only cost $848 billion over the next ten years.

The truth is that new spending in the bill will total at least $1 trillion. But that is only a fraction of the total bill. According to Michael Cannon, the mandate that everyone buy a high dollar insurance policy–or face fines and jail–should account for about 60 percent of the total cost of the bill. But these costs are being totally left out of the calculation, despite the fact that eight Democratic senators have asked that these costs be accounted for.

Add them to the mix, and we get a $2.6 trillion health care plan. And since the bill is being touted as a way to provide new health care coverage for 31 million Americans, that works out to a cost of $8,387 per person per year covered. Remember, these are new costs, so this is on top of the all the money that is already being spent on the uninsured for health care.

That is the dirty little secret of the whole health care debate. People who don’t have health insurance already receive health care. And most of it is pretty good. Just like most–but not all-of the health care that everyone else gets is pretty good.

This debate isn’t about compassion. It isn’t about helping the poor. ObamaCare will be just as bad for the poor as it is for the rest of us as we turn to government-rationed health care. The debate is about whether a few people in power will satisfy their insatiable appetites for destroying profit–at least the profit of others.