Health Care Reform and the Budget Deficit

In the Mid-Session Review of the 2010 Budget issued last August, the Administration estimated that we were on a path that would result in a cumulative deficit over the ten-year budget window from 2010 to 2019 of $9 trillion...

Finally, by far the lion’s share of the projected cumulative deficit is due to policy actions taken in the last Administration. Economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale find that policies from the last eight years that we failed to pay for, including cutting taxes, introducing a new entitlement program for prescription drug benefits, and fighting two wars, are contributing approximately $700 billion per year to the budget deficit. Before those actions were taken, we had been on track to run large budget surpluses over the coming decade.

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