An extra $111 Billion here or there, some revised projections (from Obamacare supporters!) that bend the cost curve upward, restore a couple of blocked programs, remove a bit of the double counting Democrats used to get the costs under $1 Trillion…and soon enough you have all the news organizations doing their best to hide the fact that Obamacare will now cost twice as much as originally claimed, and it is in fact THE major problem for the deficit. Yes, we do know enough about the bill not to like it, thank you very much.

And that’s not to mention the secondary effects of suppressed business hiring, pricing unskilled workers out of jobs, killing medical innovation, ending small medical practices, added bureaucracy for every day drugs, and of course all the usual troubles that come from central planning.

But let’s get back to the primary cost increases: they’re occurring because Obamacare is working precisely as designed. In fact, Obama is touting the very effects that are causing costs to increase: patients who can afford it delaying signing up for healthcare until after they have conditions that need it – and when they sign up, not being forced to pay for the fact that they’ve got a preexisting condition. So Obama is touting the fact that people can successfully jump into the insurance pool with a guaranteed net gain, to the detriment of the rest of us. Oh, and in fact, the bill also discourages doctors from taking any but the most healthy, so this behavior is encouraged.

And what about other savings measures? There’s the IPAB – the bureaucracy that’s supposed to evaluate cost effectiveness of treatments before letting medicare (which most of the bill is rammed through) spend money on it. Death panel much? They pretty much would be in England. Subject to Politicization? No? Then why are Democrats so upset that Cheney didn’t have to face the board before receiving his heart transplant? Yeah, maybe the IPAB would help cut costs, but we have no examples where they could do so without cutting effective care, and all the European examples of health systems that Obamacare proponents like to tout spend less because they get less.