Smoke and Mirrors on Healthcare

Some major shenanigans going on:

The actual cost of the Baucus bill is $1.7 trillion over ten years, but Democrats prefer to say it will cost $900 billion over the next ten years — this is true, but only because the main spending provisions don’t kick in until 2013. The Democrats also aren’t advertising that the $838 billion in new taxes and fees in the legislation begin being collected next year.

Further, the bill’s long-term deficit-reduction plans depend on cuts to Medicare — year after year — that Congress seems unlikely to support once Baucus’s bill is passed. Even when the Congressional Budget Office tallied up the costs of the bill based on the assumption that these cuts would be made, the CBO voiced doubts that they will be. “These projections assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation. For example, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) mechanism governing Medicare’s payments to physicians has frequently been modified to avoid reductions in those payments,” reads the CBO score of the Baucus bill. That’s bureaucrat-speak for “Not gonna happen.”