For instance, when Obamacare was passed in 2010, the Congressional Budget Office made a prediction about how many people would be covered under the insurance exchanges set up under the legislation. They said 23 million would be so covered by the year 2016. Do you know what the actual number was – go ahead, guess. That’s right, 10.6 million, less than half the projected number – and as we remember it, that original projection was used as justification for several of the “yes” votes for Obamacare. But that wasn’t the only prediction that the CBO made about Obamacare in 2010. The CBO estimated that the cost of Obamacare would be $948 billion for the first ten years of the program. Here’s a good place to insert a note that several members of congress had stated that the cost of O-care “had to be under a trillion dollars” or else they wouldn’t vote for it. Well, we for one weren’t worried, because we knew that one way or another the number would be conveniently under the trillion dollar figure, and lo and behold, it was. Of course, by 2014 the CBO had (ahem!) “revised” its cost projection to somewhere north of $2 trillion. For the record, that means that the original cost estimate and the original estimate of number of insured both were oceans away from the actual figure. Fewer than half the number signed up and it cost over twice as much as the first projection. To use a technical term, that’s a pretty lousy prediction
Anyway, the CBO has scored President Trump’s “repeal and replace” legislation, and has found that, after ten years, there will be 23 million without insurance. Well, who knows? But we do know that the total number covered by Obamacare through 2015 was 14 million. 2.2 million of those folks had private coverage, and 11.8 million went on Medicaid. That means that, roughly, around 20 to 30 million of those “40 million uninsured” that we heard so much about in 2008 and 2009 were still uninsured at the end of the Obama administration – despite the fines for not having insurance. The CBO said that the bill under discussion would increase the number of uninsured by 14 million over the current law - which means that even under Obamacare, the number of "uninsured" is not zero, but is closer to 10 million. So that 23 million left uninsured after the “repeal and replace” alternative is implemented doesn’t look nearly so ominous or formidable. The CBO also says the new law would reduce the deficits by $119, but we have heard that number before.
We are willing to run the risks and predict that the permanent bureaucracy will always understate the costs of a government program and overstate its savings. And we also will predict they also will understate the savings and overstate the costs of any reform that seeks to reduce the size of government. That’s two predictions we are comfortable with.