Give or Take a Trillion

Megan McArdle Links to a Cannon (at the Cato Institute) blog post that shows how the Reid bill hides over half the cost of his health care proposal. The bill requires people to pay a non-government entity for insurance, which in turn hands the money over to insurers. Now if the government taxed you and then turned around and paid that money to insurers to provide you with health care that would be counted as new federal spending. But if the government requires you to pay a third entity created by the government that then takes that money and does exactly what the government would have done with it in the first place that is not new federal spending. Got that? Cannon calculates that if the bill were scored under the rules that were used to estimate the costs of the Clinton health care proposal then bill's cost would go from under 900 billion to over 2.1 trillion. Ah, no more of those tricky private profit grabbing insurance companies trying to dupe us out of our money. The government has taken over the job for them.