And didn't we just cut 500 billion from Medicare a year and ahalf ago?
That's not what he wrote. Precision is important in questions and phrasing, otherwise you can get misleading answers or the wrong conversation.
I'm not sure I follow, but I think the Vorlon is implying that those 500 billion weren't actually saved because it was impossible?
He's stating that Obama claimed to save $500 billion through his health care plan as a whole and calling bullsh**t on it. That's not what Obama claimed nor does it follow from what Marokai wrote, which was about $500 billion cut from Medicare, which was actually used to fund changes elsewhere.
You're being very kind in your post, but I think The Vorlon is tough enough to stand by his own words as he wrote them, and accept if there's a mistake.
Let me be a little more precise.....
ObamaCare trims about $500 billion from medicare, essentially by simply putting into law that providers of medicare will be paid less for their services. They then use about $400 billion of these savings to fund other elements of the bill.
As a result the CBO scoring of Obama care is a "savings" of about $100 billion over the next decade.
This scoring is an absolute fiction. CBO is in a bind, they must run their projections based upon the law as it is written, no matter how insane or improbable.
For example, the Alternative Minimum Tax, as written and sitting on the books will raise +/- 1.5 trillion over the next 10 years, despite the fact that year after year for the last couple decades every year Congress passes a "temporary" fix to keep it from whacking the middle class.
As a leftover from Gramm-Rudman-Hollings in the 1980s, Medicare payments to doctors should be every year reduced by hundreds of billions of dollars, but again, every year Congress passes a temporary "Doctor fix", so "on the books" payments to doctors as defined by the law will be 100s of billions less, so CBO scores it this way in the out years. CBO also assumes under it's budget scoring that the Bush Tax cuts for everybody will expire in 2013, because that is the current law, as written and passed.
As CBO has said, the "can't score a speech"
CBO is doing their job, they by definition have to project based upon the existing law, even if the laws are from la-la-land and have no connection with probably reality.
If Congress passed a law saying the Air force will invent anti-gravity field levitation and that by 2015 all Air Force planes will magically fly on their own without jet fuel, the CBO wold "score" the 2015 Air Force jet fuel budget at $0.
The CBO scoring, including what was done for ObamaCare, is a classic example of Garbage In, Garbage Out....
The projection that ObamaCare will insure an extra 30 million people, expand the scope ofcoverage, eliminate pre-existing condition disqualifications, AND save money is, well..... similar to anti-gravity levitation... It just ain't so.....
IMHO anyway
