Will Obamacare Really Ease the Debt Crisis?

Meanwhile, none of the lemming-like partisans who marched with the President over the fiscal cliff ever bothered to acknowledge that finding spending cuts and tax hikes to finance Obamacare makes it vastly harder – a trillion dollars harder, in fact – to find more new sources to pay down the debt or to shore up Medicare. The accepted figure on Medicare’s unfunded commitments amounts to an almost unimaginable 38 trillion dollars. With that looming train wreck, one would think that any dollars that cost-cutters could wring out of the collapsing program would go to protecting the system’s overall viability, not to new commitments.

A sense of perspective gives the lie to the ludicrous claim that Obamacare counts as “affordable” reform, or some sort of miraculous budgetary bargain. Even those who believe in the messianic powers of Mr. Obama can’t suggest a logical basis for an expensive new program helping to trim deficits. Insuring 30 million more Americans isn’t free. New spending of $950 billion (at the absolute minimum) hardly counts as affordable in any sense of the word when the overall budget remains unsustainably unbalanced. The gimmicks, rosy projections, and benefit cuts placed on the table to sell Obamacare will make it all the harder (if not impossible) to find future sources of saving and revenue to keep the government’s rickety finances from cataclysmic and nation-threatening implosion.