March 11, 2010 7:20PM # ObamaCare Cost-Estimate Watch, Day #265 By [Michael F. Cannon](https://www.cato.org/people/michael-f-cannon) --- SHARE Today, the Congressional Budget Office released [what may be the penultimate cost estimate of ObamaCare](http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/113xx/doc11307/Reid_Letter_HR3590.pdf). Or maybe it will be the 12th-to-the-last. Whatever. That document — unlike [the CBO’s score of the Clinton health plan](http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/48xx/doc4882/doc07.pdf) — includes no cost estimates of the legislation’s private-sector mandates. As I have written previously, the private-sector mandates accounted for 60 percent of the cost of the Clinton plan. The Obama plan is remarkably similar, which is probably why [Democrats have systematically suppressed any such estimates this time around](https://www.cato.org/2009/12/16/bland-cbo-memo-or-smoking-gun/). President Obama has [implicitly acknowledged](https://www.cato.org/2010/01/30/obama-admits-cbo-cost-estimates-of-obamacare-are-incomplete/) that the CBO estimates do not reflect the legislation’s full cost. Yet it has now been 265 days since Congress saw [the first version of the Obama health plan](https://www.cato.org/2009/11/23/obamacare-cost-estimate-watch-day-157/), and we’re still waiting for a full cost estimate. And so, the [ObamaCare Cost-Estimate Watch](https://www.cato.org/?s=ObamaCare+Cost+Estimate+Watch) maintains its lonely vigil. At least [*The New York Times* is listening](http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/why-size-matters/). ##### Related Tags [Health Care](https://www.cato.org/health-care) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).