BUYER’S REMORSE?

Friday, December 25th, 2009 | Uncategorized

Ace sends along word that the Congressional Budget Office believes that one pillar of the Obama Administration’s health care plan is based around a lie an accounting trick:

CBO has been asked for additional information about the projected effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the pending health care reform legislation, on the federal budget and on the balance in the Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund, from which Medicare Part A benefits are paid. Specifically, CBO has been asked whether the reductions in projected Part A outlays and increases in projected HI revenues under the legislation can provide additional resources to pay future Medicare benefits while simultaneously providing resources to pay for new programs outside of Medicare. Our answer is basically no.

The key point is that the savings to the HI trust fund under the PPACA would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs. Trust fund accounting shows the magnitude of the savings within the trust fund, and those savings indeed improve the solvency of that fund; however, that accounting ignores the burden that would be faced by the rest of the government later in redeeming the bonds held by the trust fund. Unified budget accounting shows that the majority of the HI trust fund savings would be used to pay for other spending under the PPACA and would not enhance the ability of the government to redeem the bonds credited to the trust fund to pay for future Medicare benefits. To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability 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.

What’s fascinating here is that many on the left are starting to pick up on this “Obama lied, Grandma died” theme.  Jon Walker at FireDogLake:

The public option was clearly part of [Obama's] campaign plan. His campaign plan also promised a national exchange, drug re-importation, an employer mandate, direct Medicare drug price negotiations, to let you keep your current plan if you like it, and to bring down health care costs by $2,500 per year for a family. The Senate bill will do none of these things.

Obama did promise to not do two very important things with health care reform. He promised to not include an individual mandate and not tax employer-provided health insurance benefits. This Senate bill breaks both of those promises.

At the Huffington Post, Miles Mogulescu is even more scathing.  Barack Obama, allegedly the most far-left president this country has ever had, may have made the left’s goal of nationalized health care impossible to ever achieve.

Democrats and liberals once stood for providing a social safety net through government programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance, which were administered by government employees for the benefit of the American people and not by private companies for the benefit of their shareholders and executives who receive multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses. For over 60 years, they stood for the principal that health care should be a right and not a privilege and that Medicare should be extended to all Americans.

Democrats in Congress, under the leadership of Barack Obama, have now turned that principal on its head and made health care neither a right, nor a privilege, but an obligation for individual citizens and a government-mandated profit center for private corporations. For the first time in American history, Democrats are about to pass a bill that uses the coercive power of the federal government to force every American — simply by virtue of being an American — to purchase the products of a private company. At heart, the Democrats’ solution to 48 million uninsured is to force the them to buy inadequate private insurance — with potentially high deductibles and co-pays and no price controls — or be fined by the federal government.

When it came to health care “reform”, Obama’s strategy was to cut deals with for-profit health care corporations. He cut a deal with big Pharma to continue banning Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices and to continue banning consumers from buying cheaper drugs from Canada. He cut a deal with the for-profit hospital industry that there would be no effective national public option that might pay them lower rates that the for-profit insurance oligopoly. While he gave mild rhetorical support to the public option, he did nothing to actually fight for it , and, as Russ Feingold has pointed out, Joe Lieberman was really doing Obama’s work in killing it.

As it increasingly appears that Obama is the President of Wall Street, and not the President of Main Street, he is losing not only the left but the center. It’s a myth that the path to winning the popular center in American politics is moving to the corporate center. If the only political choice given to American voters is using their taxes to help big government subsidize wealthy corporations, or the Republican message of shrinking the size of government and cutting their taxes, many who voted for Obama will return to the fold of the seemingly brain-dead Republican Party. Obama will likely face an even more conservative Congress after the 2010 election and even, like Jimmy Carter, could end up as a one-term President.

Mogulescu’s got a good point.  If the Senate bill basically forces Americans to buy health insurance from private corporations with the US government serving as a glorified collection agency, single-payer may never happen.  How can it when senators and congressmen start receiving campaign contribution checks from health insurance companies with lots and lots of zeroes on them?

Rob Sirota reminds some House liberals of a letter they signed a few months back.

“Unacceptable” is a pretty concrete word. When applied to legislation as it is in this letter, it means, um, “not acceptable,” which means not supportable, which means a “no” vote. Sure, lawmakers often vote “yes” on things they deem “not perfect,” “only mediocre” or even “somewhat unacceptable” – but they don’t vote for things they unequivocally call “unacceptable.” To do that is to “flip-flop, “contradict oneself” and/or “lie” – take your pick.

Were we all just expected to somehow know that these 60+ House Democrats were lying when they made this declaration to only deem “acceptable” a bill with a public option? As I noted in a recent newspaper column, I know the Church of the Savvy has been gaining new members among some rank-and-file progressives who simply absolve all lying – as long as the lying comes from Democrats. But it seems to me this would be one helluva whopper to simply swallow. And the fact that the press hasn’t even bothered to ask these House members about this is sickening. Talk about the media doing its part via omission to help create ideological outcomes.

What happens if the progressive Doomsday Scenario comes to pass and Nanner McBotox somehow manages to ram through the Senate bill?  In all likelihood, I think we’d probably see a 2008 in reverse.

That is, the right’s base is fired up, the left’s base, disgusted with the Democratic Party, stays home and Democrats are massacred in 2010.  And for the next two years, every Republican running for office relentlessly ties his or her opponent to the President while every Democrat runs away from Obama as fast as he or she can.

Might Jane Hamsher’s suggestion of the possibility of a left-right coalition to defeat this bill actually come to pass?  Possibly.  But it will do that and nothing else since the goals of left and right regarding health care are not only contradictory but mutually exclusive.

If putting a bullet into the back of the head of this monstrosity provokes a genuine, open, honest, national debate on health care, then all this turmoil will be worth it.  What do we really need?  What are the benefits and drawbacks of this or that idea?  How can we extend coverage to the currently-uninsured?

Had the Obama Administration and congressional Democrats gone this route after the President’s election, they might not yet have a plan in place but they would own the issue.  The fact that they didn’t, the fact that they cobbled something together to ensure themselves plenty of campaign jack for the foreseeable future suggests that they’ve learned nothing.

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