Rep. Peter Sessions (R-Texas), a six-term congressman, is no stranger to outrageous rhetoric.
For instance, last month he claimed that illegal immigrants released by Barack Obama were committing at least one murder a day — which is patently false — and that he was holding Democrats and Obama “personally responsible.”
He’s also the same guy who said that the GOP should use the Taliban as a model for “insurgency” tactics after Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009.
But past stumbles aside, one would think that Sessions’s strong suit might be math, considering he was once the Chairman of the Northeast Dallas Chamber of Commerce, and was a marketing executive for Southwestern Bell Telephone Company for 16 years before he joined Congress.
However, that turned out not to be the case Tuesday when he claimed that Obamacare would cost $5 million per person.
Per The Hill:
Sessions cited an overall estimate from House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) that ObamaCare will cost $108 billion, though he acknowledged it was not exact.
“If you just do simple multiplication,” Sessions said, “12 million [consumers] into $108 billion, we are talking literally every single [ACA] recipient would be costing this government more than $5 million per person for their insurance. It’s staggering…. $108 billion for 12 million people is immoral. It’s unconscionable.”
Yes, $5 million health insurance would be unconscionable — if it were remotely true.
First, $108 billion divided by the 12 million newly insured is $9,000. So even if his bogus numbers were right to begin with, his “simple multiplication” was simply terrible, and inflated the price by about 500 times.
Then, as the Washington Post explains, his numbers were completely wrong to begin with:
None of Sessions’ numbers make much sense, however. The Congressional Budget Office, in a March report, said that the cost of coverage in fiscal 2016 for Obamacare (in the exchanges and Medicaid expansion) would be $95 billion, after penalty payments and other revenue. But the reduction in the number of uninsured Americans would be 23 million people.
So if you do the math correctly, that’s a cost of $4,130 per uninsured individual in 2016. So that’s less than half the figure that would have resulted from properly dividing Sessions’ numbers.
When asked for an explanation, Sessions told The Fact Checker that he had gotten his numbers confused and meant to say Obamacare had cost $1.2 trillion over the last three years and still only covered 20 million people.
That’s also false, as it would mean people are paying $60,000 for health insurance.
Either way, the CBO estimates that on about 17 million people per year will have gotten coverage between 2014 and 2016, and that $78 billion would be needed to insure 17 million people.
That’s about $4,500 per person.
Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) was none to pleased with the comments from Sessions (who, it should be noted, wasn’t referring to notes while speaking on the floor) and said, ”Nobody ever paid $5 million for anybody’s health care in a single year. It’s the most atrocious thing I think I’ve heard on this floor.”
She added, “”Mr. and Ms. America, these are the people you’ve entrusted your Congress to. They’re the people who are writing your budget.”