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The beauty of the recent turn of events/tone in the health care debate is that the public is now actually listening to the content of the Democrats' statements, including those of Dear Leader, rather than just the mellifluous sound of his voice.
So when Max Baucus now starts with the same drivel, it's actually hard to respond with anything but a chuckle.
I'm going to go through Baucus's tragi-comic opinion in some detail for purposes of showing just how much BS can be in one article by one senator.
Baucus says "At the current rate of growth, health-care spending will double in less than 10 years taking $1 out of every $5 we spend." What he doesn't tell you is that 47% of health care spending is already done by the government. What he also doesn't tell you is that by underpaying medical providers for government-paid health care, it forces up the cost for everyone else as doctors and others must raise prices outside of Medicare/Medicaid to stay in business. So just why should we support a plan that would obviously make the problem worse rather than better? As Robert Woodson said at the Steamboat Institute conference last month, "If you keep on doing what you're doing, you'll keep on getting what you got."
Baucus says "And every day another 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance." And IBD editorial about health care "reform" misinformation answers Baucus's claim well:
A little math shows this is just a scare statistic.
Multiply it out, and it comes to 5.1 million people losing coverage in a year. Sound scary? Consider that, according to the census, 46.3 million Americans don't currently have insurance — 600,000 more than last year. That means that, along with 14,000 Americans losing their coverage each day, another 12,400 Americans are signing up for it — even in the middle of a brutal recession.
Baucus says "The reality is that our plan controls spending without adding to the federal deficit, expands coverage, protects consumers from unfair insurance industry practices, and puts choice back into the hands of consumers and businesses." OK, that's laugh-out-loud funny. He goes on to explain each one, so let's tackle his lies claims:
Baucus says "For starters, our plan pays for every cent of new spending without using additional tax dollars. Our plan would lower costs and would not add to the federal deficit. In fact, it would begin reducing the federal deficit within 10 years by containing costs through industry reforms. These reforms would focus on preventing diseases before they become costly to treat and paying health-care providers for the quality of care they deliver not the number of tests they order."
However, the AP, hardly a bastion of conservatism, says Baucus's bill "would cost $856 billion over 10 years" and that "(t)he plan would be paid for with $507 billion in cuts to government health programs and $349 billion in new taxes and fees, including a tax on high-end insurance plans and fees on insurance companies and medical device manufacturers." Maybe what Baucus meant is that he doesn't plan to raise income taxes to cover the cost of his "reform"...but even that would be a lie because nobody really believes that the savings Obama and Baucus claim are available will actually be found. The public believes Baucus is lying as well, with a Gallup survey just this week saying that 60% believe the Democrats' "reform" plans can't be accomplished without tax hikes or hurting the quality of care.
As for reducing the deficit within 10 years, while we haven't seen the CBO's scoring of the Baucus bill yet, I'd bet money it won't validate that claim. The scoring of the House's health care "reform" bill, HR3200, which has been publicized as showing the measure increasing our deficit by a cumulative $239 billion over 10 years massively understates the fiscal impact of the bill. This is because the first few years of the bill might lower the deficit through huge tax increases without actually increasing spending on health care whereas after the 4th year of the plan, the deficit explodes, increasing every year, to an estimated $65 billion in the 10th year alone. In other words, the plan is designed to make the deficit increase look modest for the 10-year scoring period. But in fact, the next 10 years would likely cost closer to $1 trillion if the CBO scored that far into the future. And does anybody believe that the true deficit from government-run medicine won't be even higher than the CBO scoring, given the lessons of history?
As far as saving money through preventative medicine, that is simply a myth. This letter from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says "Although different types of preventive care have different effects on spending, the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall." (I am not saying that preventative medicine is a bad idea, just that it is not a cost-saving strategy.)
To read the rest of the article, taking apart Max Baucus's other erroneous claims, please see the full note at my web site:
Max Baucus makes a great case against ObamaCare