Getting Bent

Dontcha just hate it when it gets bent the wrong way?:

The health-care overhaul enacted last spring won’t significantly change national health spending over the next decade compared with projections before the law was passed, according to government figures set to be released Thursday.

The report by federal number-crunchers casts fresh doubt on Democrats’ argument that the health-care law would curb the sharp increase in costs over the long term, the second setback this week for one of the party’s biggest legislative achievements. …

Regardless of the health law, national health spending has been rising in recent years and economists expect that to continue. In February, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projected that overall national health spending would increase an average of 6.1% a year over the next decade.

The center’s economists recalculated the numbers in light of the health bill and now project that the increase will average 6.3% a year, according to a report in the journal Health Affairs. Total U.S. health spending will reach $4.6 trillion by 2019, accounting for nearly one of every five U.S. dollars spent, the report says.

“The overall net impact is moderate,” said lead author Andrea Sisko, an economist at the Medicare agency. “The underlying impacts on coverage and financing are more pronounced.”

At least they're not rolling it between their fingers.  They are, however, making crass street theater of having got it stuck in a toaster:

The Journal reported earlier this week that insurers have already begun raising premiums in response to the front-loading of ObamaCare benefit mandates by the White House.  That report sent Democrats into fits of anger, threatening to “ratchet up pressure” on insurers.  Representative Pete Stark (D-CA) blamed “greed” for price increases instead of the higher costs imposed by the mandates — a completely predictable consequence of adding more mandates to insurance coverage. 

That's the eternal leftwingnut scam.  Make delusional promises to ignorant, gullible voters, ram down devastingly interventionary legislation that drives up private sector costs, demagogue the private sector as "greedy" when they're forced to try to pass on those costs in order to simply stay in business, rally the ignorant, gullible voters to support outright nationalization, after which the commodity in question is rationed until the entire economy collapses and the government is free to dispense with the fiction of democracy and impose the dictatorship - of The Peepul! - they planned all along.

Except this time the ignorant, gullible voters figured out the scam - too late to pre-empt it, but in time to exile its malfeasant perpetrators to the outer political darkness for years to come.

Exit quote from Geoff: "And as the years go by, I think we'll find that the CMS's cost projections were wildly optimistic."