Krauthammer’s Take On the Pelosi health-care bill: “shameless on a galactic scale”
From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.
“We’ve always had shamelessness, but we’ve never had it on this galactic scale.
This is [the] shamelessness of a quarter-trillion-dollar trick.
And the trick works like this — the bill has in it the assumption (which the CBO has to accept) that they will cut a quarter trillion of Medicare by cutting the fees that doctors and others receive.
We know it’s not going to happen because the House is going to have a separate bill in which it pays the quarter of a trillion — with no offsets — out of the borrowed money. So it is a huge hole in the budget, but it is in a separate bill.
The separate bill ought to be called the “Pinnacle of Cynicism Act,” because that’s exactly what it is. However, in the bill that will be called the National Healthcare Reform Act, it [the payment to doctors of that $250 billion] is not going to appear, and that’s why it [net cost of the health-care bill] ends up under a trillion — when in fact it is over a trillion. And [that is] why it ends up with no deficit whereas it will increase the deficit by about $200 billion.
So that’s the black hole at the center of all this.
Secondly, if you step back and say we’re, in fact, creating an entitlement of $1 trillion dollars, and even if it is offset with raises in taxes, and …cuts in other spending, that is $1 trillion that you can otherwise apply to other parts of the ... deficit, which is now going to be $9 trillion over a decade.
So, in other words, you create an entitlement. You steal the possible revenue sources out of other deficit reduction, and in the end you blow a hole in the deficit that is just enormous.”
