Ah, Dennis. One ride on Air Force One and you're putty in the president's hands. But, of course, with a 'no' firmly in place before boarding and a 'yes' firmly in place after disembarking, I'm sure your talks on the luxury airliner were extraordinarily deep and clarifying. How your pulse must have raced when the Pres., casually dressed with his shirt sleeves turned up to make him look like one of the guys, gave you a personal shout out at his pep rally.
Sigh. (Did your shoes touch under the bathroom stalls?)
Today we have the preliminary scoring of costs on Health care from the CBO: $940 Billion over ten years. Uh huh. Never mind that money will be pouring in for four years before anyone is eligible for this monumental government grab for power. We won't talk about that.
Dems say that it proves that health care reform "pays for itself and cuts the deficit." We all know how well that works out when the government gets its fingers into our personal business. I'm trying to think of a single government program that "pays for itself and cuts the deficit."
Nope. Nothing coming to mind.
If anyone reading this can think of anything, please feel free to comment and enlighten.
Apparently, as this process has progressed, if the CBO numbers weren't what the Dems were looking for, they would do some rearranging and send it back until they finally got what they wanted. Shuffle this program over here; move these funds here; don't add in this; take out that. It doesn't mean anything has really changed. It only means that Pelosi, that charm school diva, finally managed to present a package to the CBO that would give them the tally they wanted.
Medicare has turned out to be a problem for the president in his race to alter health care in America. You know, the place where the Brits and Canadians come when something is really physically wrong with them and they need to be cured?
Fully half of the funding for the Democratic health care reforms come from cutting approximately $500 Billion in Medicare expenditures.
Medicare currently has $38 Trillion - yes, Trillion - in unfunded liabilities. Unfunded liabilities is an obscure way of saying that this huge debt is for promises made that can't be paid for. Medicare will start running short of funds in 2017, just in time for the baby boomers to become eligible.
Obama claims that cutting Medicare spending will, yes, help the program. He said, "This proposal makes Medicare stronger; it makes coverage better and makes the finances more secure and anybody who says other wise is either misinformed or they're trying to misinform you."
Of course. It makes perfect sense in an alternate universe that removing $500 Billion from a program will make it better and more financially secure.
I'm thinking the president is either misinformed or delusional. Or lying.
The $500 billion in cuts in Medicare will help its survival, but this same money is going to be used in other programs.
Now, if I have two piles of money and take a dollar from one pile and put it on another, then take that dollar and flush it down the toilet, what exactly have I saved? Now I'm going to do the same thing $500 Billion times. Call the plumber.
How does what the president is saying make sense to anyone but him? But then, he is one of the smartest men on the planet, so it must be us. We're just too stupid to understand, just like we're too stupid to choose our own health plans; and too stupid to understand that once he gets his foot in the door, we are headed down the road to a single payer system. How many videos of him saying that do we have to see before we understand what he's doing?
What he needs to do is cancel his trip to Indonesia altogether and make more and more speeches until we, the unwashed, understand that what he's doing is for our own good.
Oh, he did that.
It isn't really that we don't want it. We just don't understand it.
At some point, he might convince us that the same money isn't being counted twice. Certainly the Democratic congressmen who have been waiting breathlessly for the CBO scoring, and don't look beyond the numbers, are ready to vote 'yes' now.
The problem with the CBO is that they first count the money as savings in Medicare, but then they spend it to pay for all those subsidies they're going to give people to buy health insurance and other reforms. The CBO, a supposed neutral referee, says you cannot do that. A CBO letter on December 23, 2009 said:
"To pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government's fiscal position."
The CBO numbers don't reflect this double counting.
The CBO numbers don't reflect a lot of things.
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