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In several recent healthcare scam posts on this blog the fact that government programs always cost more over time than initially estimated was lightly mentioned. To be fair to those making the estimates it may have been a case like the current one. There is no rigid or complete model or proposal available with which to produce reasonable forecasts.

An opinion piece at Investor’s Business Daily offers the following historical footnotes on this scenario..

It was created in 1965 to provide health care for Americans 65 and over. Federal actuaries estimated that the hospital insurance portion of the program, Part A, would cost a mere $9 billion by 1990. The real cost, however, was $66 billion.

When making projections for the entire program, at that time Parts A through C, the Ways and Means Committee number crunchers made a similar mistake. They figured it would cost $12 billion by 1990, but Medicare chewed through $107 billion in its first 25 years.

When a GOP president and GOP Congress added Medicare Part D — the prescription drug benefit — in 2003, the cost was estimated at $534 billion over 10 years.

Less than two years later, the government was forced to admit the entitlement would actually cost $1.2 trillion over its first decade.

An easy analysis of the current proposal would be to determine the percentage overruns above and apply them to the 1 or 1.6 trillion estimates quoted on the current ‘reform’ proposal. A rough guess would place it somewhere between 2 and 8 times the initial estimate. At the very least that places the current proposal at 2 trillion dollars. And nine or ten trillion is an even scarier prospect. But it certainly does not fall outside the realm of reality for POLS in DC.

This is a lighter weekend post on the series of healthcare scam reports on this blog. One could invest more than that required for a full time job following this topic. But let’s not forget there are other issues to deal with also. For instance let’s not ignore the very real likelihood that at some point shamnesty will be back on the table. Then there are the 2010 elections, foreign affairs and armed conflict in more than one location. The threat of pandemic disease and widespread terrorism adds to the list. And it goes on and on. So make noise for a time on this issue with your elected reps and then proceed to the other issues.

Or you could be real cool and move between the issues to make your rep’s crazy. As if their performance in public service wasn’t a clue they are already there. Help out by getting involved. That’s this weekend’s subtle hint to readers of this blog.

Stanford Matthews
MoreWhat.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Public Affairs, Money Matters, Health, wordpress, Politics, Kennedy, disclosure, ethics, obama, Congress, Legislation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.