Via Philip Klein. The original 10-year price tag, the one that made it “safe” (but not really safe) for Democrats to drop this fiscal atomic bomb, was $940 billion. What happened, you ask? Well, see for yourself:

Remember, they gamed this thing so that it wouldn’t take effect until 2014, which means that the cost of the first four years of implementation was essentially zero. That $940 billion figure really represented just six years of cost, not 10, but it was politically invaluable to Democratic messaging in letting them tout the bill as costing less than a trillion dollars. Now that we’re nearing 2014 and the 10-year window of cost projections has slid forward, you can see what this leviathan boondoggle really costs: $1.76 trillion, soon to top $2 trillion when the window slides forward another year in 2013 and the new projection reaches into 2023.

But wait. More good news:

President Obama’s healthcare reform law coverage provisons will cost less but cover fewer people than first thought, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

The revised estimate of the law’s coverage provisions shows about 2 million fewer people gaining coverage by 2016, reducing the number of uninsured Americans by 30 million instead of the 32 million projected a year ago. That would leave about 27 million people uninsured in 2016, two years after the law’s insurance exchanges go online.

Four million Americans can expect to lose their employer-provided healthcare by 2016, according to the revised figures, far more than the 1 million people estimated last year. And 1 million to 2 million fewer people will gain access to the law’s subsidized exchanges than first thought, while an extra 1 million are expected to qualify for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Provision (CHIP).

Thanks to the economy, we’re going to end up with a lot fewer people getting health insurance through the workplace than previously estimated and a lot more people getting it through Medicaid, which, as Klein notes, inches us a little closer to that government takeover of health care that the left insists is a conservative myth. In fact, the only “good news” here is that projected revenue from penalties imposed on employers and the uninsured is up slightly, which means the net cost of O-Care has dropped by $48 billion to a cool $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. But don’t worry: We’re going to pay for that with cuts to Medicare and other stuff that’ll never, ever, ever, ever, ever happen in the real world. He’ll figure it out in his second term. Stay tuned.