The American Spectator

But those projections, as even the CBO itself has been careful to point out, are a matter of great uncertainty. Any number of developments could cause Obamacare to become vastly more expensive: more people than expected signing up for subsidies, companies dumping their employees onto the exchanges, or increased health care consumption by the millions of newly insured individuals increasing prices. In any number of plausible scenarios, Obamacare could drain the public coffers far more than expected.

Even if Obamacare proves to be as inexpensive as in the best-case scenario, overall health care entitlement spending—including Medicare and Medicaid—will grow from about 5 percent of GDP today to a truly unsustainable 10 percent by 2030, by the CBO’s projections, and will only go up from there.

In other words, Obama’s decision to add another budget-busting entitlement to the government’s already unsustainable commitments was a choice to bring America’s size of government into line with those of European-style social democracy. Unless Obamacare is repealed and Medicare and Medicaid are reformed, America’s government will grow to about half the size of the economy by mid-century. Absent significant changes, the best-case scenario is that, with a combination of massive tax increases and health care rationing, total government spending could be stabilized at about 25-30 percent of GDP. That is the liberal/Democratic vision.

Ronald Reagan may have stalled socialism’s rise in the U.S. In the past decade, however, his legacy has been slowly undermined. The facts are clear: without a fundamental change in the direction of health care spending, the U.S. economy will cease to resemble the one Reagan left behind—with low spending and low taxes—and begin to look a whole lot like a high-tax, high-spending socialist one.