Actual cost of Pelosi bill: $1,200,000,000,000

Plus, 111 new bureaucracies?

(By Ed Morrissey, Hot Air) - Nancy Pelosi rolled out her 1,990 page bill to overhaul the American health-care system like a Hummer on the showroom floor (and almost as heavy). Like any good car salesman, Pelosi told the press her version of the low low price! for her new model, getting a credulous press to report that the monstrosity would only cost $894 billion — and the media dutifully reported that number, as well as Pelosi’s contention that it would not bust the deficit, without any of their (Bush-era) skepticism. Last night, though, the AP discovered that Pelosi left a lot of things out of that final price, and experienced their own kind of sticker shock:

The health care bill headed for a vote in the House this week costs $1.2 trillion or more over a decade, according to numerous Democratic officials and figures contained in an analysis by congressional budget experts, far higher than the $900 billion cited by President Barack Obama as a price tag for his reform plan.

While the Congressional Budget Office has put the cost of expanding coverage in the legislation at roughly $1 trillion, Democrats added billions more on higher spending for public health, a reinsurance program to hold down retiree health costs, payments for preventive services and more.

Many of the additions are designed to improve benefits or ease access to coverage in government programs. The officials who provided overall cost estimates did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss them.

Few of us are surprised. The new AP total may not include the so-called “doctor fix” either, which would increase the Medicare rates for providers, as their original bill relied on earlier-enacted cuts to those fees for the lower overall cost number. However, even without it, only the gullible would have believed that the cost of the bill went in the opposite direction of the number of pages it took to contain it.