What’s more, it has been a failure on its own terms. After all, when health-care reform was passed, we were promised that it would do three things: 1) provide health-insurance coverage for all Americans; 2) reduce insurance costs for individuals, businesses, and government; and 3) increase the quality of health care and the value received for each dollar of health-care spending. At the same time, the president and the law’s supporters in Congress promised that the legislation would not increase the federal-budget deficit or unduly burden the economy. And it would do all these things while letting those of us who were happy with our current health insurance keep it unchanged. Two years in, we can see that none of these things is true.

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Under the president’s health-care law, the stated goal of which is to provide easy-to-use health insurance for everyone, you — the struggling-to-make-ends-meet patient — will see your skyrocketing mandated premiums used to pay not only for contraception, but also for the medical sequelae of a rude and obese McDonald’s customer who chooses to eat one bacon cheeseburger with fries after another. As your physician, I will be paid less and less for treating you even as insurance companies charge you more and more to cover the self-destructive among us. At the same time, Obamacare mandates will shrink your co-pays to the point where I will no longer be able to afford coffee for my nurses.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to appear selfish or unappreciative of your choosing my services; in fact, I am committed to taking care of you regardless of whether doing so still pays my bills. I will keep my office door open as long as I can afford to keep the lights on. As a private practitioner, I am a dying breed, and even as most of my contemporaries join the ranks of hospitals and clinics, I am pledged to continue to provide you with the kind of care you are used to receiving.

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ObamaCare was sold in part as a way to rein in health care costs, including insurance premiums, and as a big step toward reducing the deficit. Using an accounting gimmick that would make even a Bernie Madoff blush, 10 years of taxes were counted against six years of “benefits” to produce huge projected savings.

As we noted at the time, the 2014 date for benefits to start flowing was deliberately chosen to mask the full costs and delay the impact until after the 2012 elections. Had the full impact of ObamaCare been added to the administration’s war on business and energy, the economy might well have collapsed, and we suspect the White House knew that.

The strategy of hide and delay may have collapsed with a new Congressional Budget Office report that reveals that the current 10-year cost of ObamaCare is an astounding $1.76 trillion. That’s nearly double the $900 billion President Obama told a special session of Congress on Sept. 9, 2009, that ObamaCare would cost. He also claimed the “plan will not add to our deficit.”

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The title is disingenuous (methinks) because it’s clear that the main reason why we are talking about this is the rightly controversial mandate in President Obama’s health care reform plan that virtually all employers, including those for whom contraception is religiously proscribed or not a core business focus, give their employees free-to-them contraceptives.

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Interesting, since Big Labor pulled out all the stops to get the president’s signature on health care reform passed in March 2010. But as the waivers came, it’s clear they never had any expectation of paying for it.

From the very start they carved out special exemptions for themselves, showing all the earmarks of political favors in exchange for campaign contributions. The actual skyrocketing costs, reduced choices and lousy service were shoved on the rest of us.

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Although the former Massachusetts governor would prefer to deny it, Romneycare shares many characteristics with Obamacare, the president’s unpopular overhaul of the national health-care system, and over the past five years, Romneycare has proven to have many of the same fatal design flaws that Obamacare has.

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Business has learned the truth.

Three successful businessmen came on my Fox Business show last week to explain how Obamacare is a reason that unemployment stays high. Its length and complexity make businessmen wary of expanding.

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What if we could wave a wand and immediately enact the best elements of the best plans? Would America bounce back? At one level, the answer is undoubtedly “yes.” Growth-oriented tax rates, entitlement reform, regulatory relief, and real health-care reform would lead to increased investment and new jobs. At another level, though, the answer is “maybe not.”

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Congress needed to pass the Democrats’ health care “reform” because the law would bend the cost curve downward, Obama frequently said while campaigning for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

But the president’s promise won’t translate into reality.

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, under ObamaCare, health care spending will grow by 5.8% a year through 2020. That’s 1.1 percentage points faster than it would grow if Washington had done nothing.

This means that our health care spending will grow from 17.6% of the economy in 2009 to 19.8% in 2020, when total expenditures will be more than $4 trillion.

So what did Obama know and when did he know it about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? It’s hard to believe he wasn’t aware from the beginning that the law would increase costs. If he didn’t know it, then he’s not intellectually fit to be president. If he did know that costs would increase, yet continued to say the legislation would cut costs, he’s morally unfit for the office he occupies.

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The failure of former Gov. Mitt Romney’s health care reform to provide universal coverage in Massachusetts is well-documented. As many as 100,000 in the state remain without a health plan.

Less well documented, however, are the aggregate costs of health care reform in the Bay State since RomneyCare took effect in 2006. But that doesn’t mean there are no new costs associated with the law.

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