The health-care bill's spending in context

Mar 12, 2010 — Washington Post

Ezra Klein

I've been a bit annoyed by the convention of referring to the health-care bill's 10-year cost rather than its annual cost. We don't talk about very much in terms of 10-year costs, and so people don't have much context for it. So I asked crack intern Dylan Matthews to build a crude comparison of what various government programs are projected to cost in 2015 (chosen because health-care reform doesn't kick off until 2014, and I wanted to give it a year to get up and running). Projections are always iffy, but this is just to get an idea of the relative size of different programs. Ready for it?

What you're seeing is health-care reform clocks in around $100 billion. Which is pretty small compared to the $600 billion going to defense, or the $700 billion going to Medicare, or the $900 billion going to Social Security. It's even small in comparison to the to the $250 billion going to subsidize employer-based health care and the $150 billion for the mortgage interest deduction -- both of which are massive tax breaks for people who are a lot better off than the beneficiaries of the health-care bill. That's the health-care proposal in context: Real money, but not the biggest bill on the planet.