The absolute dead certainty of rising health care costs under Obamacare

Thanks in part to expansions promoted by California's Henry Waxman, a principal author of the current House bill, Medicaid now costs 37 times more than it did when it was launched-after adjusting for inflation. Its current cost is $251 billion, up 24.7% or $50 billion in fiscal 2009 alone, and that's before the health-care bill covers millions of new beneficiaries.

Medicare has a similar record. In 1965, Congressional budgeters said that it would cost $12 billion in 1990. Its actual cost that year was $90 billion. Whoops. The hospitalization program alone was supposed to cost $9 billion but wound up costing $67 billion. These aren't small forecasting errors. The rate of increase in Medicare spending has outpaced overall inflation in nearly every year (up 9.8% in 2009), so a program that began at $4 billion now costs $428 billion.

The Medicare program for renal disease was originally estimated in 1973 to cover 11,000 participants. Today it covers 395,000, at a cost of $22 billion. The 1988 Medicare home-care benefit was supposed to cost $4 billion by 1993, but the actual cost was $10 billion, because many more people participated than expected. This is nearly always the case with government programs because their entitlement nature-accepting everyone who meets the age or income limits-means there's no fixed annual budget.

Why should we believe them now? Are we to seriously entertain the idea that they have it right this time and that spending for Obamacare won't spin wildly out of control as it has with every single other entitlement program in history?

The reason they are going to get away with it is because they take us for fools. And from where I'm sitting, there are a lot of us who fit that description if we swallow what they are telling us about the costs of this program.

Hat Tip: Ed Lasky