New Jersey governor Chris Christie became the eighth Republican governor to cave on the ObamaCare-driven expansion of Medicaid, adding another 300,000 beneficiaries to the rolls, as reported by the Star-Ledger:
As for his decision to expand Medicaid, the Republican governor, a critic of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, could reap up to $300 million by expanding the state program in the coming budget year.
For weeks, a coalition of labor, religious, family and consumer groups waged an aggressive letter-writing and media campaign encouraging Christie to expand the Medicaid program. Doing so, they argued, would allow 300,000 uninsured and childless people to apply for Medicaid.
Before passage of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, people without children were not eligible unless they applied for welfare and earned no more than $140 a month. Allowing the expansion would reduce the burden on hospitals to treat uninsured patients, and the state, which partly reimburses those costs.
The revised Medicaid program would shift 100 percent of the costs to the federal government for these new enrollees for the first three years, then gradually taper it to 90 percent. The state could expect $1.7 billion a year to cover the costs.
Luckily, the federal government has infinite money, and can print up baskets full of dollars at need, using a printing press driven by a team of harnessed unicorns, so this should be no problem. And it never, ever breaks promises, not even after Congress turns over a couple of times. And hey, if this little Medicaid expansion doesn’t work out, kicking hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries – including the many who won’t appear in today’s optimistic estimates – out of a welfare program should be easy enough. It’s not like the reformers will be slandered as heartless murderers or anything like that.
Good thing we’ve got that unicorn-powered printing press on line, because even as Chris Christie threw in the towel, the Government Accountability Office released a new projection that ObamaCare will add $6.2 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years, as related by National Review:
Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), who requested the report, revealed the findings this morning at a Senate Budget Committee hearing. The report, he said, “confirms everything critics and Republicans were saying about the faults of this bill,” and “dramatically proves that the promises made assuring the nation that the largest new entitlement program in history would not add one dime to the deficit were false.”
President Obama and other Democrats attempted to win support for the health-care bill by touting it as a fiscally responsible enterprise. “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future,” Obama told a joint-session of Congress in September 2009. “I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.”
The new report exposes the “lack of honesty” surrounding such claims, Sessions argued. “The big-government crowd in Washington manipulated the numbers in order to get the financial score they wanted, in order to get their bill passed and to increase power and influence,” he said. “The goal was not truth or financial responsibility, but to pass the bill. This is how a country goes broke.”
$6.2 trillion is about 73 times the size of the sequestration cuts Barack Obama is presenting as the end of America. Cut $85 billion? Why, that’s impossible! Not a nickel can be spared. You’re asking Uncle Sam to cut out his own gall bladder with a spork.
But throwing another $6.2 trillion onto the national debt is easy! Don’t even give it a second thought. Don’t hold the President who lied through his teeth and told you his health-care boondoggle wouldn’t add one dime to the deficit accountable. Believe him implicitly when he rolls out more big ideas that won’t cost a dime. Just slap the snooze bar on your common sense and lie quietly until the whole diseased system comes crashing down. With any luck, your kids will bear most of the suffering.
And when the Left finally comes to its “middle-class” dupes and sadly informs them about the gigantic tax increases they must pay, it will be with the utmost regret, and the heart-rending plea that lives depend on surrendering more cash to the government, so it can keep the health-care program it lied so extravagantly about in business. You won’t really have a choice. You should get used to not having a lot of choices, from here on out. The window of liberty closes, and the boundaries of possibility contract, exactly as ObamaCare’s strongest critics predicted.
