Shocking: CBO hangs an additional $115B price tag on ObamaCare

Didn’t see this one coming, did ya? Nah (via Daniel Foster):

Congressional Budget Office estimates released Tuesday predict the health care overhaul will likely cost about $115 billion more in discretionary spending over ten years than the original cost projections.

The additional spending — if approved over the years by Congress — would bring the total estimated cost of the overhaul to about $1 trillion.

The Congressional Budget Office expects the federal agencies to spend $10 billion to $20 billion over 10 years on administrative costs to implement the overhaul. The CBO expects Congress to spend an additional $105 billion over 10 years to fund discretionary programs in the overhaul.

The CBO released the estimates in response to a request from California Rep. Jerry Lewis, ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. A spokeswoman for Lewis said the inquiry was filed before the House voted on the bill.

“[L]arge sums of discretionary spending in both the House and Senate versions of the health care reform bills have not yet been included in estimates by the CBO, rendering it impossible to make informed decisions regarding the outcome of this legislation,” Lewis wrote in a February letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asking her to postpone votes until the discretionary spending analysis was complete.

The CBO estimated in March that the net cost of the overhaul would be $788 billion over 10 years, but cautioned that it couldn’t make an estimate of the discretionary costs without more time and information.

Right. Well, if I were the CBO I’d have a hard time estimating the longterm costs of ObamaCare, too, considering the Congressional left’s smoke and mirrors approach to basic math.

In any event, expect the numbers to rise and rise as time goes on. Some have even predicted that the true total cost of ObamaCare will be close to $3 trillion when all is said and done, all in the name of “helping” you, of course – when in reality the only group it will help are the big government liberals in the federal government who will always believe you’re too stupid to be able to manage your healthcare decisions and who think it’s their “Constitutional right” to dictate costs to doctors, and to tell them what procedures that can perform and which ones they can’t.

Gives the term “managed care” a whole new meaning.