Just before President Obama's national health care law passed in March 2010, I created a chart to visualize how Democrats had delayed implementation of the major spending provisions until 2014, so that 98 percent of its $940 billion projected cost came in the last six years of the Congressional Budget Office's 10-year budget window. This allowed Democrats to claim the legislation met Obama's pledge that the law would cost "around $900 billion over 10 years," even though the true cost was far higher. Yesterday, the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and with the shifted timeline, the ten-year cost of the law's core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now escalated to $1.76 trillion. So I've created the updated graph below. Notice how low the numbers are in the 2010 to 2013 time period and how they quickly soar. All the spending to the right of the black line wasn't reflected in the CBO's estimate for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) at the time of passage.
