WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats are using phony accounting to claim their health-care legislation isn’t a budget buster, Congress’ own nonpartisan auditors charged in a letter yesterday.
The Congressional Budget Office said rosy projections by Senate Democrats that their health-care bill will cut the deficit by $132 billion while still being able to fully meet future Medicare obligations is mathematically impossible.
“To call this ‘reform,’ you would have to call Bernie Madoff honest,” said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH).
The bill includes some $500 billion in projected savings for Medicare, leading sponsors to say it will make a huge cut in the deficit.
But in the small print of the more than 2,000-page bill, Democrats turn around and essentially spend that savings twice, according to the CBO letter.
Democrats overstate “the improvement in the government’s fiscal position” based on Medicare cuts, wrote the CBO.
“The true increase in the ability to pay for future Medicare benefits or other programs would be a good deal smaller.”
Gregg said: “We’ve heard a lot of talk from the other side of the aisle about how Medicare’s not being cut and if it is being cut, it’s just being used to help finance a new entitlement and therefore it should be counted as part of the basic effort to bring fiscal responsibility to this bill.
“Well, that’s hokum.”
The accounting in the Senate health-care bill — which is scheduled for a vote this morning and is expected to pass — is strikingly similar to the accounting used to run and expand Social Security and Medicare. Both programs could face insolvency in the near future, watchdogs say.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) first asked the CBO to evaluate the accounting practices used in the health-care bill. He said of the Medicare math: “If a private company had done this, a president of a private company had proposed such a bogus scoring system, they’d be going to jail.”
A spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) downplayed the importance of the CBO analysis by saying it only pertained to cuts to Medicare and didn’t look at the overall deficit.
Meanwhile, the attorneys general of seven states said they will jointly take a look at whether the special provisions inserted into the bill to purchase the vote of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) are constitutional.
The officials, all Republicans, said that since the federal government is picking up the full tab for an expansion of Medicaid in Nebraska, it will have to do the same for other states. With Post Wire Services