You would think the administration wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth and would leave the CBO's ultimately favorable scoring alone because further scrutiny might backfire on the White House.

Former CBO Director (2003-05) Douglas Holtz-Eakin maintained on Fox News that CBO's scoring grossly understates Obamacare's costs, which he quickly explained is not CBO's fault because it has to use the information given to it by Congress.

There are glaring problems with the information Congress provided. First, said Holtz-Eakin, it omitted some inconvenient spending: "We're going to have to spend $250 (billion) to $300 billion more on Medicare doctors over the next 10 years; they just left that out. It's going to cost $115 billion to implement this bill; they left that out. So it underestimates the cost dramatically."

Holtz-Eakin didn't have time to finish expounding on his points, but he provided more detail in a March 20 New York Times op-ed (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21holtz-eakin.html).

In that piece, he noted that the $70 billion in premiums expected to be raised in the first 10 years is counted as deficit reduction, but the benefits they will have to finance are assumed not to materialize in the first 10 years, so they are not figured into the costs. It's a complete gimmick, which others have also pointed out. Holtz-Eakin cited other gimmicks and inaccuracies, but the "most amazing bit of unrealistic accounting" is that the legislation contemplates shifting $463 billion from Medicare spending to finance insurance subsidies without any reforms to recover those losses from an "already bleeding" Medicare.

The bottom line, said Holtz-Eakin, is that Obamacare "would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion. ... And the nation would be on the hook for two more entitlement programs rapidly expanding as far as the eye can see."

This is horrifying stuff, folks, which the public already understands in its gut. We were headed for national bankruptcy before Obamacare, but this will seal the deal, unless repealed.

In addition, Holtz-Eakin, in a paper published on his American Action Forum Web site, shows Obamacare will likely increase taxes for 25 percent of filers making less than $200,000 -- and for 52 percent of all taxpayers -- the impact of which will pass through to small-business owners when unemployment is already skyrocketing. How's Obama's "no new middle-class taxes" pledge working out for us now?

But costs and taxes aren't even the main reasons to fear Obamacare. Try the evaporation of our personal liberties.