It’s now a clear pattern. When the president senses his position is vulnerable to a factual criticism, he asserts emphatically that the opposite is true — without ever providing evidence to back up his claim.
Here’s the latest example. According to Politico, President Obama told skeptical Blue Dog Democrats last evening that they should support the health care bill emerging in the House because it would produce savings beyond the ten-year budget window.
Oh really. Says who?
The context here is crucial. It’s already abundantly clear that the federal government cannot afford its existing health care commitments. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently projected that Medicare and Medicaid costs will nearly double in twenty-five years, from 5.3 percent of GDP today to 10.0 percent in 2035 (this assumes continuation of current policy with regard to physician fee updates). The Medicare Trustees projected in May that the program’s 75-year unfunded liability has reached $36 trillion.
Moreover, the federal government is projected to run massive budget deficits for the foreseeable future. In 2009, the government has already run up a deficit of $1 trillion through June, and it could reach $2 trillion before it’s over at the end of September. CBO expects the Obama budget plan would increase the government’s debt by $11 trillion from the end of 2008 to the end of 2019. Running up government debt at that kind of pace would put the nation’s economy at considerable risk, to put it mildly. At some point, lenders would demand higher returns for their lending, pushing interest rates up and choking off growth, or the Fed would partially monetize the debt with even easier money and rapid inflation.
It is in this context that Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are trying to rush health care bills to their respective floors for consideration before the August congressional break.
The centerpieces of the bills are the creation of a new, massive entitlement to health insurance subsidization and a large expansion in Medicaid eligibility. The House bill, unveiled today and available here, would add $1.2 trillion in federal costs over a decade with just these two expansions, according to CBO. And the trend is even more alarming. Between 2018 and 2019, federal costs for the new entitlement and the enlargement of Medicaid would increase by a combined 8.9 percent.
That shouldn’t be surprising though, because that’s basically the rate at which Medicare and Medicaid have been growing for more than four decades. And there’s nothing in the House or Senate health care bills which would lead one to assume a new health entitlement program will grow at a more moderate pace in the future than the ones already on the books have done in the past. CBO has said repeatedly that slowing the pace of rising costs will require a fundamental restructuring of financial incentives, for consumers and suppliers of medical services. Nothing currently on the table in Congress comes close to meeting that test.
That was essentially the message CBO delivered to members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension committee last week. In response to a question from Sen. Judd Gregg, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf said a bill which simply expanded coverage without fundamental reform “puts an additional long-term burden on top of an already unsustainable path” (Elmendorf’s testimony can be seen here, with his response to Senator Gregg at the 1 hour, 38 minute mark).
Moreover, it seems that President Obama’s own budget director agrees with CBO. Last week, Peter Orszag delivered a letter to House leaders saying their bill doesn’t go nearly far enough to slow the pace of rising costs. But even that didn’t stop the president from saying otherwise in his desperate attempt to round up votes.
The federal government’s budget is already knee-deep in debt, largely because politicians have promised that better days ahead will make all budgetary problems go away. They haven’t, and the current president is making the situation much worse. The last thing any member of Congress should do is simply take the president’s word for it that the health care bills under consideration will ultimately “bend the cost-curve.” If he really believes that — because no one else really does — he should provide some hard evidence to back up his claim. And that’s not a theoretical possibility. He could ask his independent projection experts — not his political appointees — to provide directly to Congress and the public, without review by anyone else, their best estimates of what these bills would do to the long-term (25- or 50-year) budget outlook. Those estimates would be taken much more seriously than unsubstantiated assertions which run against commonsense and all evidence.