Here is an example of why the government should NEVER be given any kind of planning power. This is the sort of thing that von Mises was talking about when he came up with the concept of the impossibility of socialist calculation.
At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion,” wrote Steven Hayward and Erik Peterson in a 1993 Reason article. “The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was supposedly a ‘conservative’ estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.”
In what other field of human endeavor can you be off by more than 1200 percent without suffering any consquences. Even in sports, the GM who can’t manage his salary cap can’t expect to keep his job.