RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama’s health plan should be rechristened “The Unaffordable Care Act.” Precisely as Obamacare’s critics predicted, the officially titled Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is no bargain for taxpayers or patients.

Obama signed this measure on March 23, 2010. Less than two years later, its original $940 billion, ten-year price tag is in tatters. As the Congressional Budget Office re-forecast Tuesday, this program will cost $1.76 trillion through fiscal year 2022. This is a predicted 87 percent overrun, not even 24 months into this boondoggle. At this rate, the Unaffordable Care Act may do for medicine what the Big Dig did for public works.

How did this initiative deteriorate so quickly?

“The books have been severely cooked,” explains House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.). As devious Democrats concocted Obamacare in 2009, they delayed its full implementation until 2014. Hence, back-loaded expenses mainly filled the final six years of CBO’s 10-year analysis of the bill’s costs (FY2010–2019). As they forced Obamacare down America’s collective throat, Democrats lied about how delicious it was, claiming a ten-year price tag below $1 trillion.

CBO’s latest valuation now reflects two more years of this contraption. Gross costs for FY 2021 and ’22 equal $250 billion and $265 billion, respectively. This clearer picture nearly doubles the act’s advertised price. Soon, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.) frets, “the Democrats’ health-care law is certain to top more than $2 trillion.”

The now-defunct Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act is a key reason for the Unaffordable Care Act’s unaffordability.

Even before it passed Congress, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) called this long-term-care provision “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing Bernie Madoff would be proud of.” As Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard Foster, concluded: “Thirty-six years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant federal subsidies to continue.”

Indeed, last October the Obama administration dismissed CLASS as unworkable — eliminating its $86 billion in anticipated deficit reduction.

The Unaffordable Care Act should sicken taxpayers, and patients, too.

“The President said that by enacting this health-care law, every family would save $2,500 per year,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) recalled at a March 7 Appropriations Committee hearing. “The Kaiser Family Foundation has already released a study saying that average costs of family health-care plans are up $2,200,” Johnson added. “We’re already different by $4,700; it’s going to be hard to get us down to $2,500 cost savings.”

Also, the CBO expects an additional 4 million Americans to lose their employer-provided coverage, as managers choose to pay fines rather than premiums on costlier, Obama-approved health plans. As the Ways and Means Committee found, “This will force hardworking Americans to purchase government-mandated insurance in government-run exchanges or pay a penalty.”

As the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein observed Tuesday, the Unaffordable Care Act will drive at least 39 million people into the loving arms of the state. By 2022, Klein wrote, “3 million fewer people will have health insurance through their employers, while 17 million Americans will be added to Medicaid, and 22 million will get coverage through government-run exchanges.”

Most amazing, the CBO states: “More are expected to be uninsured.” The Unaffordable Care Act will cover many Americans who lack insurance, but not as many of them as expected. This law, the CBO calculates, “will reduce . . . the number of uninsured people by 2 million less than previously estimated.” For all of its profligacy and intrusiveness, come 2022, Obamacare still will leave 27 million Americans without health insurance.

Next November 6, the American people can jettison this rubbish by dumping every available Democrat on Capitol Hill who enacted it. (Congressional Republicans wisely and unanimously rejected this legislative malpractice.) As for the con man who signed the Unaffordable Care Act, Barack Obama cannot be frog-marched back to Chicago swiftly enough.

— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.