Washington, D.C. – With the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projecting an expansion of Medicaid to cost approximately $500 billion, the total cost of the Kennedy health care bill once it is fully implemented would approach nearly $2 trillion.
“How are we going to pay for a $2 trillion bill? We’re already getting swallowed up by runaway deficits and debt that are going to threaten our fiscal security for decades to come,” said Senator Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee and the Senate’s only accountant.
“Our nation is in peril, and we cannot ignore the enormous costs of this bill and the very negative impact it will have on our financial crisis.”
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Kennedy bill would cost $868 billion from 2010-2019. However, the program would not be fully implemented until 2014, after which the annual costs would increase substantially. In the ten year period after the bill is fully implemented, the bill would cost approximately $1.5 trillion. CBO projects that the massive expansion of Medicaid, assumed by the bill’s authors, would cost an additional $500 billion, bringing the real cost of the Kennedy bill to approximately $2 trillion over ten years.
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