Bend It Like Marx

"Yesterday, over at my Forbes blog, my colleague Chris Conover paid tribute to those three Harvard economists and their favored president, by employing the same arithmetic they did to calculate how much more Americans would spend on health care due to Obamacare. He took the $621 billion, divided by the U.S. population, and multiplied by four.

“Simplistic?” Chris asked. “Maybe, but so too was the President’s campaign promise. And this approach allows us to see just how badly that promise fell short of the mark. Between 2014 and 2022, the increase in national health spending (which the Medicare actuaries specifically attribute to the law) amounts to $7,450 per family of 4.” Chris put together a chart that compared Obama’s 2008 promise to the Obama administration’s 2013 projection:
As you might expect, certain corners of the Left were not happy. Igor Volsky of ThinkProgress put up a blog post claiming that Conover’s math was “totally wrong,” because a couple of pro-Obamacare economists told him so. Paul Van de Water, a progressive budget wonk, “described this calculation as one of the stupidest things he’s read in a long time.”

(Van de Water, for reasons unclear, did not offer his assessment of the intelligence of the president or his three Harvard advisers. I asked Judd Legum, the editor of ThinkProgress, if his site had ever run a comparable critique of Obama’s 2008 promise; he declined to answer.)
Van de Water told Igor that the cost of college education doesn’t increase if the federal government subsidizes college education; therefore, the cost of health care doesn’t increase if the federal government subsidizes health care."

Read here.