he primary weapon liberals have used to push back against Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare is to suggest that Obamacare reduces the national debt, and thus repealing Obamacare will increase the national debt and make hypocrites out of Republicans who have promised to be fiscally responsible. “[A]s a matter of arithmetic, using the math that Congress always uses, the bill saves money,” says the Washington Post’s Ezra “the Constitution is too old to understand” Klein. ” It cuts enough spending and raises enough taxes to more than pay for itself, both in the first 10 years and in the second 10 years.” Except, that’s not actually true. As Veronica de Rugy explains:
Assuming the very unlikely scenario that every cut in the Affordable Care Act is enacted, the law contains provisions that have conflicting effects on net federal spending. On the one hand, it increases spending by increasing the federal commitment to Medicaid and increasing federal subsidies for private insurance; on the other hand, federal payments to Medicare and private insurance are legislated to decrease.
While the increases are a sure thing, the savings are unlikely to materialize. In 2010 alone, Congress has already headed off four scheduled payment drops — in January, March and April and December (I think). In fact, as the CBO noted, “Congress has kicked the can down the road on payment reductions yet again, putting off the reduction in payment rates until at least December 2010.” But even that didn’t happen.
The bottom line is that this law doesn’t reduce federal spending on health care under even the rosiest of scenarios (that is, projections that take seriously all its creators’ assumptions).
The Democrats’ gambit in suggesting that Republicans are deficit hypocrites for wanting to repeal Obamacare asks us to assume that the CBO, working under narrow instructions from the past Democrat supermajority, was honest in its accounting of the bill.
We all know that to be a farce.
