New Study: Obamacare will add $340 billion to the nation’s deficit in the next 10 years

The CBO originally calculated a small savings based on a carefully parsed set of conditions given to them by Democrats. Reality is now setting in.

(WaPo) — President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.

The study is set to be released Tuesday by Charles Blahous, a conservative policy analyst whom Obama appointed in 2010 as one of two public trustees for Medicare and Social Security. His analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that the health-care law, which calls for an expensive expansion of coverage for the uninsured beginning in 2014, will nonetheless reduce deficits by raising taxes and cutting payments to Medicare providers.

The 2010 law does generate both savings and revenue. But much of that money will flow into the Medicare hospitalization trust fund — and, under law, the money must be used to pay years of additional benefits to those who are already insured. That means those savings would not be available to pay for expanding coverage for the uninsured.  [...]

In arriving at his deficit figure of $340 billion, Blahous updates the numbers through 2021 and subtracts savings that would have come from another provision of the law: the CLASS Act, a long-term-care program that was supposed to have generated as much as $86 billion in new revenue through 2021. The administration acknowledged last year that the CLASS Act is unworkable and suspended efforts to implement it.