Democrats continue policy of bad faith arguments on health care

Rich Lowry:

WHERE does Newt Gingrich go to get his apology?

Back in the mid 1990s, Gingrichproposed slowing the rate of growth of Medicare and Medicaid -- and was clobbered by Democrats and the press for waging war on the elderly and the indigent. Now, almost every other day, President Obama finds another hundred billion dollars to cut out of Medicare and Medicaid.

Over the weekend, Obama announced the discovery of another $313 billion in savings over 10 years, on top of $300 billion he'd already proposed. Soon enough, he'll make Gingrich -- who infamously sought $450 billion in savings over seven years in 1995 -- look like an extravagantly generous steward of the nation's health programs.

No liberal outcry greeted Obama's proposed budgetary savagery because everyone knows it's in the cause of more government spending. Obama must embrace a simulacrum of spending discipline to have any hope of passing a health-care pro- gram that will cost at least $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. The game is simple: Pretend to cut so you can spend.

Medicare and Medicaid spending has steadily outpaced inflation through the decades, and accounts for 23 percent of the federal budget. Medicare's unfunded liability is an astonishing $89 trillion. As Obama put it in his speech to the American Medical Association yesterday, there's a risk the programs will "swamp our federal and state budgets, and impose a vicious choice of either unprecedented tax hikes, overwhelming deficits or drastic cuts in our federal and state budgets."

Sounds alarming. So why turn around and immediately spend the $600 billion in savings? Shouldn't it be used to shore up the rickety finances of these existing health programs rather than to create a dubiously financed, new health program?

Obama's cost-savings gestures always reek of bad faith. He announced in his speech to a joint address of Congress in February that he had already identified $2 trillion in savings in the federal budget, when they were really far-off expenditures for the Iraq War that never would've taken place anyway and already-scheduled tax increases -- i.e., not new savings at all. He risibly hyped a $100 million spending cut as a meaningful reduction. He called last week for reinstituting "pay-go" rules in Congress, even though the rules exempt 40 percent of the budget.

...

Obama and the Democrats are masters of the politics of fraud. Gingrich was just one of the more obvious victims of that politics, but ultimately the taxpayers are the victims and the voters have been the facilitators. Perhaps the votes will wise up in 2010, but will it be too late to stop this monstrosity?

The Democrats did a good job of demonizing Gingrich. Obama did the same with McCain on his health care proposals, some of which he now embraces, but the voters don't have the uxury of a do over for a few more months.