A new CBO report finds that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid will drive federal spending to all-time highs in coming decades.

June 29, 2011
WSJ

By STEPHEN MOORE

Remember the much ballyhooed ObamaCare promise to “bend the health care cost curve down”?

Well, a new Congressional Budget Office report on the long-term trend in the federal budget finds that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid will drive federal spending and debt to all-time highs in coming decades. In one scenario, federal health-care spending doubles over the next 25 years, to 11% of GDP in 2035 from 5.6% this year. In another scenario, the debt eclipses 100% of GDP by 2021 and 190% of GDP by 2035. That’s higher than where Greece is right now, and we see what the bond vigilantes are doing there.

What is conspicuously missing from this report is the magical windfall from the new health law. CBO reports that it is “using the same growth rates that would have been applied in the absence of the legislation.” Now they tell us. Hence, Medicare alone is projected to nearly double over the next 25 years, from 3.7% of GDP to almost 7% by 2035.

CBO warns that ObamaCare’s purported payment cuts to doctors and hospitals and the hoped-for reductions in the growth of the insurance subsidies would be “difficult to sustain over a long period.” Let us translate all this mumbo jumbo: The ObamaCare cost savings are mostly bunk.

Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304584004576415841964301396.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond

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