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Cost of health care reform keeps going up — MedCity Morning Read, Nov. 3, 2009

The health care bill headed for a vote in the House this week would cost $1.2 trillion or more over a decade — far higher than the $900 billion cited by President Obama as a price tag for his reform plan.

By Mary Vanac on November 03, 2009

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The health care bill headed for a vote in the House this week would cost $1.2 trillion or more over a decade — far higher than the $900 billion cited by President Obama as a price tag for his reform plan, according to an Associated Press story in the Boston Globe.

While the Congressional Budget Office has put the cost of expanding coverage in the legislation at roughly $1 trillion, Democrats added billions more for public health, a reinsurance program to hold down retiree health costs, payments for preventive services, and more, the AP said.

Many of the additions are designed to improve benefits or ease access to coverage in government programs. Yet, even with the new help that Democrats want to provide, the CBO said yesterday (pdf) that some middle-class families would still face a big budget hit for health care.

A family of four making $66,000 a year could face a total health care bill of $10,000 — the total of premiums, co-payments, and deductibles, even after $10,500 in government assistance, the budget analysts said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has referred repeatedly to the bill’s net cost of $894 billion over a decade for coverage. Republicans put the cost of the bill at nearly $1.3 trillion. “Our goal is to make it as difficult as possible for” Democrats to pass it, House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said at a news conference, the AP said. “We believe it is the wrong prescription.”

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