Purple People Vote

The President’s speech last night apparently was a final kiss off to his 2004 statement that, “We aren’t red states, and blue states, we are the United States.”  Certainly President Obama is within his right to tell Republicans where to put their health care plans, as it wasn’t so long ago that Republicans would have done the same to Democrats.  Yet this isn’t the ‘change’ that his campaign promised.  The irony is that President Obama used a letter from Ted Kennedy to push for health care reform, mentioned two Republican Senators (Hatch and McCain) who had worked with Kennedy on bipartisan bills, who clearly feel affection for the late Senator as evidenced by their attendance at his memorial services, yet neither one supports the President’s health care reforms.  The President hasn’t even won over Maine Senator Olympia Snowe who routinely crosses party lines.  Last night’s speech was the clearest example to date that President Obama’s only attempts at bipartisanship are rhetorical.

So after about two dozen health care speeches from President Obama what remains is that basic question – How?  How do you pay for these reforms when the non-partisan CBO has already stated that the current health care plans are not budget neutral?  How do you keep a public option on the table, when the American people have been very clear that they don’t want one, and when Senator Baucus earlier in the day stated that a public option could not pass in the Senate?  President Obama is excellent at giving speeches, the problem isn’t form it’s substance.  No one knows any more about the health care reform plans today than they did yesterday, and the most basic element of the plan, cost, is still left unaddressed.

From the AP Obama uses iffy math on deficit pledge

President Barack Obama used only-in-Washington accounting Wednesday when he promised to overhaul the nation’s health care systemwithout adding “one dime” to the deficit. By conventional arithmetic, Democratic plans would drive up the deficit by billions of dollars.

The president’s speech to Congress contained a variety of oversimplifications and omissions in laying out what he wants to do about health insurance.

OBAMA: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future. Period.”

THE FACTS: Though there’s no final plan yet, the White House and congressional Democrats already have shown they’re ready to skirt the no-new-deficits pledge.

House Democrats offered a bill that the Congressional Budget Office said would add $220 billion to the deficit over 10 years. But Democrats and Obama administration officials claimed the bill actually was deficit-neutral. They said they simply didn’t have to count $245 billion of it — the cost of adjusting Medicare reimbursement rates so physicians don’t face big annual pay cuts.

Their reasoning was that they already had decided to exempt this “doc fix” from congressional rules that require new programs to be paid for. In other words, it doesn’t have to be paid for because they decided it doesn’t have to be paid for.

The administration also said that since Obama already had included the doctor payment in his 10-year budget proposal, it didn’t have to be counted again.

That aside, the long-term prognosis for costs of the health care legislation has not been good.

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf had this to say in July: “We do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount.”