ObamaCare just turned six, and it is one expensive law, as we just read in the Tribune Review editorial:
On the sixth anniversary of President Obama signing the ObamaCare law and saddling the nation with its regulatory diktats, here's a disquieting statistic that won't be trumpeted: $55 billion in waste and counting.
Investor's Business Daily crunched the numbers. More troubling still is that the hemorrhaging will continue from this health care mess. Among the losses to date:
• $1.2 billion in startup loans for ObamaCare's 12 (out of 23) failed insurance co-ops.
• $1.5 billion in failed or unrealized state-run health exchanges - and not one of the remaining 14 is fully functional, according to a government audit.
• An estimated $45 billion for the 165 million hours that businesses and individuals spent trying to comply with ObamaCare's 106 new regulations.
• $750 million in public subsidies to more than 500,000 people who weren't eligible for coverage.
• $3.5 billion diverted from the Treasury to insurance companies to help cover their losses.
For all the happy talk about gains in the public's insurance coverage (except, of course, for the unfortunate folks who signed up with one of the government's failed insurance co-ops), the reality is a burgeoning, unsustainable government bureaucracy that is on pace to cost considerably more.
The bad news is that ObamaCare is very expensive. The good news is that it may not survive this cost trajectory, i.e. collapse of its own weight!
We are already hearing criticism from the Clintons about ObamaCare. Chelsea Clinton said publicly that her mother would control ObamaCare's "crushing costs" by executive order. This is obviously a sign that Democrats know that the law is not working, or at least not working as promised.
We read that many of the exchanges have failed. Enrollment is down 40%, in large part because people without subsidies are not signing up.
The ObamaCare is about something else: Don't do big things on a one party basis. ObamaCare would have been a much better law if President Obama had listened to GOP critics and put together a bipartisan law.
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