Today’s health care reform point of shame: the mountain of debt that will bury future generations.

The Congressional Budget Office calculated the cost of the House health care reform at $894 billion over 10 years – which will be more like $1.5 trillion, as the Heritage Foundation’s James Capretta shows, once all Congress’ legislative tricks have been factored in.

The CBO scored the Senate health care bill at $829 billion, which will be more like $2 trillion, as the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon points out, due to the same legislative sleight-of-hand. (“And for my next trick, I will saw U.S. emissions standards in half!” Okay, shouldn’t joke about that probably.) But seriously, the federal government has a pretty terrible track record on staying within cost estimates, as this Joint Economic Committee briefing paper demonstrates.

As IWF’s recent poll on women’s opinions regarding health care reveals, 46% of respondents felt that it was impossible to spend $829 billion (hey, we were feeling charitable) and save $81 billion, as the Baucus Senate bill allegedly did. Where will that money come from? Future generations, of course – but hey, it’s not like your unborn grandchildren can vote the bums out of office in 2010, right?

These proposals are too vast, and far too expensive. To mortgage our children’s future for programs that will provide Americans with worse care than they currently have now is sheer insanity. For a few good videos driving home how unconscionable this is, I recommend these two clips from the Family Research Council: “Inheritance of Debt” and “Get to Work.”