Ready for More Obamacare Sticker Shock?

Hint: you’d better be:

Obamacare exchange customers could see a significant spike in their premiums over the next few years as insurers face pressures from both the government and the marketplace, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday in a new analysis finding Obamacare is both cheaper and less comprehensive than predicted.

The CBO said the exchanges and other new medical coverage under the Affordable Care Act will cost the government slightly more than half a trillion dollars over the next five years, which is about $200 billion less than than the $710 billion projected when the law was enacted in 2010.

Some of that is due to tweaks to the law, and to changing economic conditions, but the CBO and its fellow scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, said medical care costs have also grown at a slower rate than projected, helping lower payments for both private care and for government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.

If this were Japan, everybody at the CBO would have committed ritual seppuku by now, from the shame of having been so brutally used and discarded as the president and the apparatchik Democrats tried to sell his phony tax increase disguised as “health care.” Suckers!

But wait — it gets worse. Even though the fiasco is “projected” to cost the government less than expected, there’s a cloud to that silver lining:

“Although it is unclear how much of that slowdown is attributable to the recession and its aftermath and how much to other factors, the slower growth has been sufficiently broad and persistent to persuade CBO and JCT to significantly lower their projections of federal costs for health care,” the CBO said in its report.

The lower costs are at least in part due to fewer people gaining coverage.

The CBO predicted 11 million people will be enrolled in insurance exchanges in 2015, rising to 21 million next year. Both of those are lower than initial projections.

Of those 11 million using the exchanges this year, about 8 million will be getting tax subsidies to help pay for their plans. The average subsidy is $3,960. By 2020, about 23 million Americans will be using the exchanges and 17 million will be getting government help, at an average tax payment of $5,070.

In other words, “health-care reform” turned out to be — surprise! — just another Democrat welfare program.

If there is one thing that Americans need to learn from this deliberate fraud, is that there are lies, damn lies and projections. But they probably won’t, because the MSM is damn sure not going to tell them.