On the recordSeptember 24, 2013
When you look at the big picture of this, when we say: Well, we want to provide health insurance for everybody, which I think is a noble cause, you look at what we have. The government already provides Medicare for everybody over 65. But Medicare is $35 to $40 trillion short. Why? It is nobody's fault really. We are living longer and a lot of people are retiring. So we have a big baby boomer generation. But Medicare is $35 trillion short. So we are instituting a brand new entitlement. It is very big, the biggest we have had in 50 years. But we are going to pay for it by shifting money from Medicare that is already $35 trillion short. That alone should give people pause. The other thing that I think should give people pause is we cannot get people to sign up for this free program. The President is going to spend tens of millions of dollars on TV promoting it, hiring people to come knock on your door to sign up for something that is free. You know something is disorganized when people will not take something that is free. Mr. McCONNELL. This bill was also sold, as we both recall, as doing something about health care costs. I was just noticing here that HHS's own actuaries revised their projections just last week to say that ObamaCare will actually increase health care costs by $621 billion out across the economy. Is there any way, I would say to my colleague, Dr. Rand Paul, how this could possibly hold down costs?
Source
govinfo.gov