The Ransom, Mr. Powers, is......ONE TRILLION DOLLARS (give or take)

And.......cue music.

"Understanding Obamacare is so difficult".  We have heard this time and time again from the Talking Heads, but they do a disservice to the public with these proclamations.  Obamacare is not only simple, it's simplistic. 

Case in point: how much more will Obamacare cost than what we currently spend?  The Obamites would have you believe that costs will actually go down, but for virtually every reason, this is nonsense.

There are five - and potentially six - broad means by which Obamacare will drive up the cost of our current government/private health care system, and one rather dubious means by which it is proposed to lower costs.  

Not surprisingly, the single most expensive government expenditure increase will be for the expansion of Medicaid coverage. The Brookings Institute estimates that Medicaid roles will be expanded by 17 million people under Obamacare.  Using Kaiser Foundation numbers on current Medicaid expenditures, this alone will cost over $155 Billion per year.

Second is the expansion of benefits under Medicaid to bring it more in line with private insurance.  Since per capita Medicaid expenditures are already 40% higher than those in the private market, it's hard to imagine how it could require yet more money, but accounting for yearly inflation and a modest rise in incremental costs, it's reasonable to assume that Medicaid per capita will increase by at least 15% in the next year.  This is especially true because in the reform of Medicaid, the federal government has not at all changed the perverse dollar-for-dollar federal match on current-year state Medicaid expenditures.

The third driver of Obamacare inflation is the provision of insurance policies to the workers who do not qualify for Medicaid, along with generous taxpayer subsidies for both the premiums and OOP (out of pocket) expenditures.  Per the Obama administration, some 38 million of the 60 million uninsured will subscribe to policies on the Exchanges.  Since there is no "history" for tracking private insurance policies that originate on Obamacare's newly created Exchanges, for comparative purposes I've base-lined their theoretical 2012 cost at a rate comparable to a 2012 private policy, roughly $5,000 per person.  As you can see, Obamacare policies are hugely more expensive, averaging over $7,000 per person in the first year.  That is why the line item shows 40% inflation in 2013.

The fourth driver will be for dental and comprehensive optical for this same group.  I've broken it out separately for the simple reason that Obamacare's Exchange health insurance policies do not cover dental or anything more than the most basic of optical.

Fifth on the list and by far the most expensive driver of Obamacare's costs is the inflation of our current private health care policies.  Conventional wisdom is that close to 100% of them - mostly employer subsidized - will not be in compliance with Obamacare mandates.  As we have seen with the overnight collapse of the individual private health insurance market, the employer market will either collapse - causing a massive migration into more expensive Exchange policies - or require a massive increase in premiums so as to cover all the additional costs imposed by Obamacare. 

This line item alone comes to almost $1 Trillion.

 Last but not least is the Big Question Mark - the remaining uninsured.  It's absurd to think that nearly twenty years after Hillary Clinton attempted what Barack Obama actually accomplished there will still be some 22 million people without health insurance of any kind, but such is the bizarre consequences of a policy so extreme in its expense and so byzantine it it's complexity that it could not afford to provide universal health coverage.  And even assuming that the vast majority are Illegal Immigrants, the enfranchisement of "more benefits" for virtually everybody else under Obamacare will certainly add momentum for the extension of similar benefits to those "left behind".

So there you have it folks: left to its own devices - and with a functioning website - Obamacare will have siphoned well more than $1 Trillion from the rest of the economy and into health care once fully implemented.  Thanks to the monumental incompetence of the Democrat Party and their bureaucratic minions, it will take longer than that, but left unchecked, the outcome is near inevitable.