Pat Dollard

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And it will cost a trillion dollars.

From the Congressional Budget Office Director’s Blog:

According to our preliminary assessment, enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010-2019 period. When fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million or 17 million.

According to current estimates of 47 million uninsured, this plan still leaves us with 30 million uninsured, A trillion dollars spent on complicating and bloating our present system to little effect. Ridiculous.

And Ed Morrisey at Hot Air throws in the final kicker:

“But that would be akin to the “public plan,” which the trillion-dollar CBO cost estimate doesn’t cover. The inclusion of such a plan would remove the incentive for employers to offer insurance at all, which would create many millions more uninsured. At the same time, the public plan would undercut private insurers in the individual markets, pushing people who got kicked out of an employer group plan towards the Medicare-like coverage — and accomplishing single payer by default.”

Obama wants four things out of this: revenue, control, dependency, and leverage. Healthy Americans, a healthy health system, a healthy economy, and a healthy and appropriate Federal Government, be damned.