Remember when President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010? He emphatically made a number of statements – if you like your insurance plan you can keep it, every family would save $2,500 per year on health care, and the law would be budget neutral. Fast forward 10 years and these statements are absolutely false. (here)

The original ACA budget was $940 billion over the first 10 years, with half of the funding coming from new taxes and half from cuts to Medicare spending. The benefits of Obamacare began in 2014, with the expansion of Medicaid and the beginning of the subsidies in the ACA exchanges. Estimates of the cost of Obamacare after 2014 run as high as $1.76 trillion over 10 years.

Through the years, Congress deferred several of the taxes until the current budget which is now working its way through the U.S. House and Senate. Specifically, Congress, on a bipartisan basis, is repealing the tax on insurance plans, the tax on medical devices, and the “Cadillac” tax on high-priced health insurance plans.

The estimated total revenue from these three taxes is somewhere between $145 billion (here) and $373 billion (here).Of course these taxes would have simply been passed on to patients, making health care all the more expensive.

Obamacare has been a massive failure at reaching its two main goals – holding down the cost of health care and universal health insurance. The repeal of these three taxes, while welcome from a patient standpoint, simply compounds the fiscal irresponsibility of the law. Their repeal will clearly add to the federal deficit and ultimately the national debt.

It is beyond time to repeal the entire ACA and start over with meaningful health care reform. (here)