To: Bill who wrote (1120299 ) 2/25/2019 6:45:48 AM From: FJB Read Replies (2) | Respond to breitbart.com The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a little-noticed report last week that confirms what Obamacare critics said from Day One: the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates for the cost and impact of the Affordable Care Act were off by enormous margins.American voters should carefully consider this object lesson when evaluating all socialist promises. If socialists couldn’t predict the effect of Obamacare accurately, how can anyone trust their predictions for vastly larger and more complex government takeovers like “Medicare for All” or the “Green New Deal?” it would have seriously derailed Democrat scaremongering during the Obamacare repeal battle of 2017, but as Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner noted , the truth was “literally a footnote” when it dribbled out in 2019. The individual mandate was a core element of Obamacare. The people who cooked up the scheme were convinced a huge number of people would fail to purchase insurance unless they were threatened by Uncle Sam. As Klein noted, Barack Obama himself was reluctant to include the mandate because he was desperate to pretend Obamacare was a wonderful system people would join voluntarily. He wanted to minimize the amount of heavy-handed coercion in the original bill to make it easier to pass, but he became convinced the mandate was necessary to generate enough revenue for the system to work. socialize the cost of health insurance, it would be necessary to force a very large number of people to buy insurance and minimize the “free rider” problem. That problem was always dramatically overestimated. Many people grudgingly supported Obamacare because they were convinced uninsured people were imposing backbreaking costs upon the health care system by flooding emergency rooms and obliging hospitals to treat them.A system that forces everyone to buy insurance seemed like a reasonable solution to the problem… but little attention has been paid to studies that found the problem was much less severe than was widely believed, and it has arguably grown worse The burden imposed on the old system by the uninsured was nothing to sneeze at, but there were far better ways to handle it than Obamacare, which made itself look reasonable by radically overstating the problem and underselling the cost of the “solution.”This sort of thing happens all the time. CBO estimates are treated as a gold standard by policymakers, and if they make tax cuts look more expensive or Big Government programs less expensive, they are holy writ to the left-leaning media. In truth, CBO is dramatically wrong in many of its most politically influential estimates, often because it overestimates bureaucratic fidelity to legislation and underestimates how the American people will respond when the heavy hand of government descends upon them. How can anyone trust the government to design and implement trillion-dollar schemes when its estimates are routinely off by billions, and even trillions, of dollars? The Obamacare individual mandate is merely the latest in a long series of examples that demolishes the assumption central planners are smarter than the markets. They don’t know what any of their Big Government machinery will actually do when switched on… and they trick us into forgetting there is no way to switch them off, no matter how badly they malfunction.
