The Deem-o-crats’ towering deception
“When statistics are not based on strictly accurate calculations, they mislead instead of guide. The mind easily lets itself be taken in by the false appearance of exactitude which statistics retain even in their mistakes, and confidently adopts errors clothed in the forms of mathematical truth.” — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, volume 1, part 2. (h/t John Pitney)
6:40pm Eastern update. Just in from CBO: “Medicare fix would push health care into the red.”
The Deem-o-crats’ towering deception
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010
If you cannot trust government’s numbers, you cannot trust government’s words. This is the lesson of the House Democrats’ desperate promotion of a phony-baloney, Congressional Budget Office analysis of their latest health care takeover package.
Democrat leaders leaked a solid-seeming price tag figure — $940 billion over 10 years – before the CBO released any official comment or report. Liberal blogs and mainstream news wires started parroting Democrat claims that their plan “would cut the deficit by $130 billion over the next decade, and $1.2 trillion in the second decade of the plan’s implementation” – again, before the CBO had released an iota of information. And hours before the House Rules Committee posted the long-awaited reconciliation bill.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn pronounced himself “giddy” over the supposed CBO scoring. Math-lover House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed: “I love numbers. They’re so precise.”
But “precise” does not mean “accurate.” And the most “precise” numbers can be utterly worthless. Which is basically what the CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf pointed out in his summary of the unofficial, preliminary analysis of Demcare:
“Although CBO completed a preliminary review of legislative language prior to its release, the agency has not thoroughly examined the reconciliation proposal to verify its consistency with the previous draft. This estimate is therefore preliminary, pending a review of the language of the reconciliation proposal, as well as further review and refinement of the budgetary projections.”
Translation: Garbage in, garbage out. Elmendorf’s weary number-crunchers know they are just more stage props in the Oba-Kabuki health care theater. Like the president’s partisan donor-doctors dressed up in their White House-supplied lab coats, the CBO’s statistical authorities are being exploited to lend credibility and solidity to the Democrats’ legislative vaporware.
The CBO didn’t release its non-report report because it was finished. The agency released it because Democrats needed cover for their bogus transparency pledge to post the bill 72 hours before voting for it (which they still didn’t fulfill). The good news is that the number-crunchers say they may have a real, final, useful analysis done by Sunday. The bad news is that the House Democrats – moving forward with their “deem-and-pass” trickery to – are scheduled to ram this monstrosity through by Sunday.
Pelosi touted fantasy savings from cutting Medicare waste, fraud, and abuse totaling some $500 billion over the first 10 years of the Demcare plan – but the House Democrats rely on reaping massive dividends from Medicare reimbursement cuts that no one in Congress has had the courage to make. They also set aside the projected $200 billion so-called “doctor fix” to Medicare to make their math fit.
The first four years of Demcare clock in at $17 billion. Which means the last six would cost a whopping $923 billion. As the CBO noted, it “does not generally provide cost estimates beyond the 10-year budget projection period” — with second-decade projections subject to “an even greater degree of uncertainty” than its projections for the first 10 years.”
Yet, over the past week, Democrat leaders blithely jiggered and re-jiggered their plan to get under a trillion-dollar spending threshold. Like the children’s building-block game of Jenga, they stacked tax hikes and subsidies and Medicare cuts and illusory savings into a rickety tower of budget deception – then gingerly slid out the priciest pieces, re-arranged them all, and pushed back the spending kick-ins until the resulting edifice stood steady long enough to stay beneath 12 zeroes for a passing moment.
There’s an old saying that “Figures don’t lie, but liars sure do figure.” Every major Demcare statistic – from the inflated number of uninsured to the politicized junk-science statistic on the number of Americans who purportedly die from lack of health insurance to the mythical savings that will come from squandering “$940 billion” – is a single-payer-promoting figment of liberal imagination.
Mathematical corruption is ideological corruption. The health care battle – and the battle over truth in government accounting – is not just about health care. It’s about the lies and damned lies that will be used to ram through cap-and-trade, illegal alien amnesty, and endless more bailouts. As Pelosi vowed last week, “Kick open that door, and there will be other legislation to follow. We’ll take the country in a new direction.” Yep: Straight to a red-ink-stained hell in a handbasket.
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She’ll be praying to St. Jude if it passes. If she thinks that the American public will just go away, she’s in for a surprise. Anyone thinking of running against her?
Thank God the Hannity charity stuff has been debunked. I was sooo hoping the Debbie Schlussel crap wasn’t true.
Yeah BOB, questioning The Won might get us called names or pointed and laughed at, which would be so much worse than swearing in a marxist revolutionary as President.
Forget for a moment that this whole dog and pony show has nothing to do with healthcare. It’s all about taking away another piece of the freedom pie from Joe and Jane Sixpack and giving it to David Brooks’ “educated class.”
But, as I said, we’ll forget that for a minute and pretend that it really is about healthcare and that to completely analyze the bill requires knowing what it’s financial impact will be. No offense to Douglas Elmendorf and his cadre of tireless number crunchers, but they aren’t good enough to come anywhere close to what the financial impact of this is going to be over 10 years. They haven’t yet invented the crystal ball that will give them anything but a silly, wild-assed guess. Including figures for a 2nd decade is even more of an insult to my intelligence.
Instead let’s look to the past and dig up what the Douglas Elmendorfs of yore had to say about the financial impacts of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the other bits and pieces of LBJ’s not so great society. Hell, they just implemented Medicare Part D a few years ago. How’s that working out vs. what the wise men were saying 6 months before it passed?
It’s a fact. Every government boondoggle ever tried in every country in the world has cost more and delivered less than what was predicted at the outset. You could look it up.
This one isn’t going to be any different. There isn’t going to be any damn deficit reduction. The deficit caused by this monstrosity will in fact exceed the GDP sooner than anyone is willing to admit.
Obamacare’s Sad Racial Provisions
Sad indeed.
Next on the agenda, 30 million illegel aliens who broke the law, do not pay taxes, get tax payer health care, etc… will be voting for the demorats, and a North American Union.
I was robbed of all my weapons, or they were buried somewhere. I can’t remember.
Whither our country??
Bandu > Jenga
Leno just made joke about the cheering audience: You sound like a bunch of Dems lining up to get you freebies to vote yes.
When Leno notices it….
Not a Brooks fan (Mel, yes – David, no). But to be fair, even he is against the reconciliation process.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/opinion/16brooks.html
Yep, don’t want to be called names.
There are at least three reasons why Obama may not be eligible….yet this issue, which could literally save America, is left for the “fringe” to discuss, while a near revolution brews against the Marxist/Communist in power.
Why will people not actually look at this and then….demand proof….millions of people demanding proof? Instead, they hope there will actually be an election in 2012.