Obamacare: "A Colossal Fiscal Disaster"

Describing the Affordable Care Act as possibly the "greatest act of fiscal irresponsibility ever committed by federal legislators," Charles Blahous, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University writes:

When new enrollment figures were released last week, the national discussion focused on whether the ACA is fulfilling its coverage expansion goals. The largely unwritten and more important story, however, is that the ACA is rapidly becoming a colossal fiscal disaster as enrollment proceeds heedless of the concurrent collapse of the law’s financing structure.

Blahous lists several of the ACA "funding mechanisms" that have fallen apart, leaving the federal government with no viable plan to finance the Obamacare program. Worse, legislators put the program into place at a time when existing entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security were already spinning out of control.

Consider this: just five years after enactment the ACA will absorb more of our total economic output than Social Security did fully sixteen years after it was enacted. [snip]

The ACA was enacted when legislators knew, or should have known, that they inhabited a fiscal environment in which such extravagance was unaffordable. Deficits (and debt) are far higher today than when the other major entitlement programs were created; millions of baby boomer retirements are swelling expenditures arising from previously-enacted Social Security and Medicare law. Someday historians will puzzle over the thinking that induced legislators to embark on a vast new spending program at the very moment it could least be afforded.