Such a Deal: $1 Trillion to Insure Just 16 Million More

Liberalcrats are scrambling to spin away a troubling (but no doubt right on) estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that “reforming” health care will come at a price tag of $1 trillion over ten years and will result in covering  just 16 million additional Americans out of a reported 47 million currently without health insurance. (The CBO estimate actually foresees the loss of 23 million privately insured individuals, with 39 million from all sources gaining insurance for a net of 16 million added insureds, not all of them newly insured.)

Ezra Klein, as usual, has become the media’s front man for liberal hype and cover-ups in the health debate. Klein has never met a government program that isn’t better than anything ever invented in human history. I guess he doesn’t drive, so he’s never experienced the DMV, or ever tried to get his Asian bride a green card. Or how about dealing with the IRS?

Whatever Klein and the liberal fabricators are doing seems to be working in the polls, which show that the public still favors health care reform. However, if you look through the polling data in enough depth, you’ll realize that the public somehow believes that so-called reform is going to make their health care costs, if not free, at least cheaper, not higher and more onerous (which is the guaranteed result of all this governmentizing of health care).

For instance, the uninsured, when asked how much they’d be willing to pay for health insurance, chose “nothing” as the overwhelming first option, but two-thirds did say they’d go as high as $100 a month, and one-third were really generous in saying they might be able to come up with $200 a month.

Yeah, and I got a nice bridge you can buy in Brooklyn for $24.

I guess we live in a delusional world suddenly. With everyone’s retirement savings having been wiped out, people are looking for a compensatory payback in free health care, evidently.

What they’ll get instead are increasingly higher taxes followed by long lines and wait lists to get health care, which in no time flat will also be rationed and in many cases simply denied.

“You’re too old for that procedure. You don’t have enough useful years left in the job market to justify getting a new hip. Just suffer. When you retire, you can sit all the time, and the hip won’t bother you.”

That’s what you get when you expect something to be free.