Can We Get A Refund ?

On Monday the Daily Caller ran an article about the estimate from the Congressional Budget Committee on the cost of Obamacare.  The problem with the Congressional Budget Committee is that their estimates of the cost of a program are based only on the information and figures they are given.  They can only estimate cost on the information they are given.  It has recently come to light that because they were not given complete information, the Congressional Budget Office underestimated the cost of Obamacare as much as $50 billion per year because they were not given an accurate picture of how the program would work.. 

The article reports:

“In May a congressional committee set the accounting rules that determine who will qualify for federal health care subsidies under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. When the committee handed down the rules to the Congressional Budget Office, its formula excluded the health care costs of millions of workers’ spouses and children. The result was a final estimate for 2010 that hides those costs.”

Since many people have families covered under their healthcare programs, that is an important fact.

The article further reports:

“But companies and their employees share great incentives to rearrange workers’ compensation to win more of these federal subsidies, he said.

“For example, he explained, an employee can ask his employer to raise the price of company-provided insurance in exchange for an equal increase in salary. In many cases, that would boost the share of his income spent on health insurance to a percentage above the 9.5 percent threshold.

“Such an arrangement, Burkhauser (Richard Burkhauser an economist who teaches in Cornell University’s department of policy analysis and management) added, would make the employee, his spouse, and his children all eligible for federal health care subsidies while enriching both employer and employee — even after the Treasury Department collects fines from U.S. workers.

“Burkhauser’s research found that because of the law’s incentives, an extra one-sixth of workers who get their health insurance from employers — or roughly an additional 12.7 percent of all workers — would gain by transfering themselves and their families into the federal exchanges.”

The problem here is that when you offer some people a free lunch, everyone wants one.  That is human nature, and until the government stops handing out free lunches, government spending will continue to spiral out of control.