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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.
Mitt Romney pitched his 2006 health reform -- which Democrats view as a model for universal coverage -- as modest and affordable, yet already its public option is annihilating the Massachusetts fisc. The original cost estimate for last year was $472 million; final spending came in at $628 million. Spending this year is at least $75 million over initial budget, while projections for next year range as high as $880 million -- and even those are probably too low.
Capitol Hill's entitlement Democrats are determined too press ahead, despite this cost detour. Still, this week's lesson is that ObamaCare might not be inevitable once Americans figure out the astonishing price tag.