Reason’s Take
I posted my take this morning, but Reason’s take is better:
Today, as Nick Gillespie noted earlier, Washington is shocked, SHOCKED to learn that the Affordable Care Act might not be as easy to pay for as promised. According to an AP summary, a new report ”found that the law falls short of the president’s twin goal of controlling runaway costs, raising projected spending by about 1 percent over 10 years. That increase could get bigger, sinceMedicare cuts in the law may be unrealistic and unsustainable, the report warned.”
But didn’t budget-hottie Peter Orszag warn us not to be swayed by such obviously false charges? After all, ObamaCare is fiscally responsible! What clan of knee-jerk critics could have produced such a report? The libertarians at Cato? The conservatives at Heritage? The neocons at AEI? The socialists at Physicians for a National Health Plan?
Try again: This is the word straight from the Obama administration’s Health and Human Services Department, the agency assigned to manage the reforms at the federal level.
Nor did the report’s bad news stop there. It also “projected that Medicare cuts could drive about 15 percent of hospitals and other institutional providers into the red, ‘possibly jeopardizing access’ to care for seniors.” So when the President told AARP members that “nobody is talking about reducing Medicare benefits,” presumably he meant nobody but, um, HHS and Medicare’s chief actuary. But they don’t really count, do they?
More here.
So the Obama administration had information that the health care bill would not reduce costs or cut Medicare, but Obama claimed the opposite in order to get the bill passed and signed. I think I remember another president who covered up and withheld information when trying to get this country to commit to a fiasco. People didn’t like it.