https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dghoik-gJ4E
Appearing on The O’Reilly Factor yesterday evening, Charles Krauthammer lit into President Obama’s delays and revisions in implementing the Affordable Care Act: “Look, the promise of this president was, ‘Obamacare won’t cost a penny.’ Now, you know, anybody who’s got a mind would understand, if you’re going to give health care to 30 million people who haven’t had it, there is no free lunch; but he kept pretending, and they kept putting provisions in the law that would make the CBO create estimates on these provisions that would show that it would pay for itself.”
Krauthammer defended the Congressional Budget Office for estimating that the bill would reduce the federal budget deficit; he blamed the bill’s authors for deliberately writing provisions to game the CBO’s scoring system.
The CBO isn’t acting wantonly; it has to follow what’s written in the law. And what Obama did is, he put all of this bait-and-switch stuff in the law which created the estimates that it would be O.K. Now all of these measures are removed, and now we can starkly see how much it will bankrupt the Treasury.
He pointed to the CLASS Act entitlement for senior care as a prime example, arguing that
the way it was written into the bill, it wouldn’t start for a decade, but you and I would have to start putting in our premiums right now, so they’d have a decade of premiums with no expenditures. They know the CBO can only project ten years; so in the end, that would look as if it balances. . . . That’s highly cynical.
Krauthammer added, “Of course it’s unconstitutional” for the president to choose which provisions of the law to implement.