And so it begins: One in ten employers already saying they’ll drop health coverage

The Congressional Budget Office released their post-Supreme Court ruling reassessment of ObamaCare earlier today, and — unexpectedly — the latest numbers are even less attractive than we originally estimated. Who could’ve seen this coming?

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday said President Obama’s healthcare reform reduces the deficit by $109 billion over ten years.

This is a new re-estimate in light of June’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the law and it is a smaller deficit savings than CBO had previously projected.

CBO said the ruling added uncertainty to its estimates but it has put forward a number that comes down in the middle of possible outcomes.

In March 2011, CBO said that ‘Obamacare’ would reduce the deficit by $210 billion over ten years, despite increasing spending by $1.042 trillion over 10 years.

Despite their insistence that ObamaCare is going to help bring down the deficit (I remain wildly and incorrigibly skeptical), this is still just a fancy way of saying that ObamaCare is going to cost more than they originally thought — or, rather, more than they originally and miraculously managed to convince themselves it was going to cost.

I also wonder if there’s any way in heck they could possibly be taking into account all of the neighborhood effects that are going to come about as a result of ObamaCare, since there’s no possible way of knowing what all of those are going to be — and therein lies the trouble with massively intrusive behemoths of legislation that are enough to make the Founders roll over in their graves. The distorted incentives, regulations, many new taxes, and rampant uncertainty coming to fruition under the auspices of the PPACA are already rearing their ugly heads, and they’re not even finished writing all of the rules for the darn thing, let alone the mishaps that will come during actual implementation. Here’s just one fresh example:

About one in 10 employers plan to drop health coverage when key provisions of the new health care law kick in less than two years from now, according to a survey to be released Tuesday by the consulting company Deloitte.

Nine percent of companies said they expect to stop offering coverage to their workers in the next one to three years, the Wall Street Journal reported. Around 81 percent said they would continue providing benefits and 10 percent said they weren’t sure.

The companies, though, said a lot will depend on how future provisions of the law unfold, since most of the key parts are scheduled to take effect in 2014. One in three respondents said they could stop offering coverage if the law requires them to provide more generous benefits than they do now, if a tax on high-cost plans takes effect in 2018 as scheduled or if they decide it would be cheaper for them to pay the penalty for not providing insurance.

Oh joy, oh rapture. What other lovely little gems shall we discover if/when the ObamaCare saga continues to unfold?

• Obamacare supporter shocked that employers moving to bare bones coverage
• Yay! Tax dollars for “prison poetry”
• IRS official in charge during Tea Party targeting now runs agency’s Obamacare office

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