The Senate Budget Committee’s Republican staffers once again took aim at President Obama’s claims about the Affordable Care Act Thursday.
“Health care has long been the single-biggest driver of America’s future deficits,” Obama said in a recent speech at Northwestern University. “It’s been the single-biggest driver of our debt. Health care is now the single-biggest factor driving down those deficits.”
The deficit has been falling in the past few years and has reached a six-year low, but the Congressional Budget Office projects it will rise along with the debt in coming years. (RELATED: Deficit Falls To Six Year ‘Low’ Of $483 billion)
Obama has said he would not sign a law that increased the deficit, but Obamacare alone is expected to increase the deficit by more than $100 billion over the next ten years, according to a Senate Republican Budget Committee staff analysis based on Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation data.
That deficit will increase to about $6.2 trillion over the next 75 years, a Government Accountability Office study shows.
Obama attributed the falling deficit to reduced health care costs. “Partly because health care prices have been growing at the slowest rate in nearly 50 years, the growth in what health care costs the government is down,” he said in the speech.
But Senate Republican aides contend the law will actually increase health care costs, especially for many individuals and small businesses, and also for the Federal government. Family premiums are up, employers are hiring fewer workers and replacing full-time workers with part-time workers, and the CBO has said it will place “tremendous pressure” on the federal budget, they say.
In addition to increasing the deficit and health care spending, Senate Republican staff point out the law will cause 2.5 million Americans to leave the work force and $1 trillion in lost wages, according to a recent CBO analysis. And the government will spend nearly three times what Obama promised — $2.6 trillion, according to their analysis.
“Obamacare is the most extravagant financial deception ever heaped upon the American people,” a Senate Budget Committee aide told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
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