Irony.The Obama administration threatened to veto parts of its own health care bill after budget scorekeepers found that the package would add at least $115 billion more to government health care spending.
President Obama's budget office charged Congress with finding $115 billion in spending cuts or tax increases to offset the price tag hike. The figure approached the amount of money the Congressional Budget Office previously estimated the law would save, and pushed the total 10-year cost of the package past $1 trillion. It comes after a separate Medicare office report found the bill would raise spending by about 1 percent over the next decade.
But the Office of Management and Budget stood by the administration's original claims that the law would reduce the deficit and tasked Congress with making sure that happens -- or else.
"The Affordable Care Act will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion in the first decade, and that will not change unless Congress acts to change it," budget office spokesman Ken Baer said. "If these authorizations are funded, they must be offset somewhere else in the discretionary budget. The president has called for a non-security discretionary spending freeze, and he will enforce that with his veto pen."
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