Obama's bet on illusory health care savings

David Brooks plumbs the White House for a rationale for the spending binge and a way out. It is all apparently based on Obama's belief that he can get enough saving from health care expenditures to pay off the deficit. This is certainly a hope that does not match experience. In fact his program will cost more, not less.

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... The first problem is that most experts, with a notable exception of David Cutler of Harvard, don’t believe they will produce much in the way of cost savings over the next 10 years. They are expensive to set up and even if they work, it would take a long time for cumulative efficiencies to have much effect. That means that from today until the time President Obama is, say, 60, the U.S. will get no fiscal relief.

The second problem is that nobody is sure that they will ever produce significant savings. The Congressional Budget Office can’t really project savings because there’s no hard evidence they will produce any and no way to measure how much. Some experts believe they will work, but John Sheils of the Lewin Group, a health care policy research company, speaks for many others. He likes the ideas but adds, “There’s nothing that does much to control costs.”

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If you start with Medicare expenditures having always run significantly higher than projections, it is hard to even believe that Obama believes that adding more beneficiaries to government health care programs will lead to any savings.