WaPo Editors: Obama’s health care math should make you nervous

Welcome to the party fellas. When the president says his plan won’t add one dime to the deficit, will cover everyone, will allow you to keep your plan, and will improve the quaIity of care, I usually start thinking that the unicorns will be here any minute. After the president’s Hail Mary speech on Wednesday, the AP did a fact check and found many of his claims to be a stretch, at best. For example, on the assurance that “it won’t add one dime to the deficit,” AP notes that the Barry and the Dems are full of it.

THE FACTS: Though there’s no final plan yet, the White House and congressional Democrats already have shown they’re ready to skirt the no-new-deficits pledge.

House Democrats offered a bill that the Congressional Budget Office said would add $220 billion to the deficit over 10 years. But Democrats and Obama administration officials claimed the bill actually was deficit-neutral. They said they simply didn’t have to count $245 billion of it — the cost of adjusting Medicare reimbursement rates so physicians don’t face big annual pay cuts.

Their reasoning was that they already had decided to exempt this “doc fix” from congressional rules that require new programs to be paid for. In other words, it doesn’t have to be paid for because they decided it doesn’t have to be paid for.

So the Washington Post this morning jumps on The One and notes that when you are relegated to paying for a program with savings by the government cutting its own “waste, fraud, and abuse,” you are at the smoke and mirrors phase of the debate.

When politicians start talking about paying for programs by cutting “waste and abuse,” you should get nervous. When they don’t provide specifics — and when the amounts under discussion are in the hundreds of billions of dollars — you should get even more nervous.

President Obama outlined, in his speech to Congress last week, a sensible framework for health-care reform. But here are a few questions he has yet to answer:

– What exact combination of new revenue and spending cuts is the administration proposing?

– Will that financing be adequate to underwrite the cost of expanded coverage — not only within the 10-year budget window but beyond?

– What mechanisms does the administration envision, if any, to control costs if they are greater than anticipated or if projected savings don’t materialize?

The Post doesn’t like the answers Obama has given so far.

Squishy talk about cutting “hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud” isn’t enough.

The problem is that Obama’s plan is fatally flawed. Why should we believe that the government will do a good job running health care? After all, they are going to pay for ObamaCare by cutting the waste, fraud, and abuse out of the existing government-run health care programs. If there is such a huge amount of savings to be wrung out of Medicare and Medicaid, isn’t that conclusive proof that the government is incapable of effectively running health care?

Also, if Obama says that there will be no rationing of care for seniors or denial of care for those nearing death (‘death panels’ if you will), how does he expect to pay for that care after he drains those programs of $622 billion?

The irony is that Obama ripped McCain during the campaign for proposing cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and today, those very same cuts are the foundation for Obama’s plan. Here is Obama’s campaign ad and our earlier post on this issue. Ask yourself: When a guy does a 180 like this, can’t we choose to believe what he said first – the part where he said we can’t afford it.

The Post editors are nervous for a good reason.