drugs and guns and violent crime. it good-byes them hope. parts of that bill remain controversial even contested. but as for violent gun crimes, shootings went down over the next decade in a nation that struggles to get gun violence under control, will you this decrease. and you know what else went down? the number of democrats in congress after that vote. democrats lost 54 house seats, eight senate seats in the election held two months after they passed the assault weapons ban. bill clinton was for the ban, signed it into law but even he would go on to say the law cost 20 members their seats in congress, the nra is the reason the republicans control the house. hmm. stop and just think about that. the president who did that very rarest of things in our politics got gun control legislation passed, even he publicly said it was a political loser. that would can like obama saying obamacare was bad politics.
anecdotes which will be bad coverage for the law and for the administration. but the real issue becomes whether the law is going to work, whether you re going to have enough people to sign up to make the law cost effective. okay. so for insurers here, benjy, they don t like this change. it opens up an exemption in the law. one originally just for people under 30, as you know, and now people who had their policies cancelled and think the obamacare plan is too expensive, they can be exempt and go for catastrophic plans as one of their options. is this creating, do you think here, a two-class system? well, the concern from ahip, the major insurance lobby, is that, one, it creates a general sense of confusion. people aren t quite sure which plan they fit into, what exactly they re eligible for, but also that it might skew the risk pools. put people in catastrophic coverage that was meant for people under age 30 and should be in another area, it might create problems down the line as
americans will lose their employer health insurance. reporter: in fact the new law cost about a trillion dollars over the first ten years, four of which are before the law takes full effect beginning in 2014. the ten year cost of the bill is estimated by some to be $2.6 trillion and the administration argues it will not add to the deficit, meaning taxes of some kind will have to cover it. the administration has laid out more than 400 billion in increased taxes and 500 billion in cuts to medicare. but the chief actuary of medicare says this money cannot be spent elsewhere. listen. the claim was medicare is going to be cheaper miraculously so we have this money we can use to spend on a brand-new entitlement program. if the first part isn t true you ve got to spend that money on medicare, you can t spend it a second time on the insurance entitlement. reporter: that could present a problem to the president to come up with other revenues, even though he pledged not to increase taxes o