Congressional Democrats are proposing a sweeping overhaul of the American health-care system, which represents about 17 percent of the U.S. economy. You might think they would feel a responsibility to explain the precise implications of this legislation to the American people before it comes to a vote.
But after one week of hearings in the Senate Finance Committee — presided over by the legislation’s principal author, committee chair Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) — it’s become obvious that Senate Democrats want to pass this bill in a hurry, and that hiding the contents from the American people is an instrumental part of their attempt to do so.
The lack of transparency is stunning. Let us count the ways.
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1. Democrats are hiding the true cost of the bill.
The actual cost of the Baucus bill is $1.7 trillion over ten years, but Democrats prefer to say it will cost $900 billion over the
next ten years — this is true, but only because the main spending provisions don’t kick in until 2013. The Democrats also aren’t advertising that the $838 billion in new taxes and fees in the legislation begin being collected next year.
Further, the bill’s long-term deficit-reduction plans depend on cuts to Medicare — year after year — that Congress seems unlikely to support once Baucus’s bill is passed. Even when the Congressional Budget Office tallied up the costs of the bill based on the assumption that these cuts would be made, the CBO voiced doubts that they will be. “These projections assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation. For example, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) mechanism governing Medicare’s payments to physicians has frequently been modified to avoid reductions in those payments,” reads the CBO score of the Baucus bill. That’s bureaucrat-speak for “Not gonna happen.”
2. Democrats don’t know how much the bill will cost — and don’t want anyone else to know, either. So far, some 500 amendments have been proposed for the Baucus bill, many of which will make the legislation more expensive — how much more expensive, no one knows. Just last Wednesday, the Senate Finance Committee approved a supposedly cost-neutral amendment by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.). A few hours later, the CBO informed the committee the bill would cost $600 million. Once the Finance Committee is done considering the amendments in the ongoing mark-up hearings, we could be looking at a radically different and far costlier piece of legislation. Remember all the giveaways that were required to secure enough House votes to pass the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill? Expect similar add-ons to Obamacare.
And then, it will be hard to tell how much the legislation costs; the Senate Finance Committee doesn’t work with the actual legislative language. They work in “conceptual” language or what they call “plain English.” Senator Baucus himself admits, “This probably sounds a little crazy to some people that we are voting on something before we have seen legislative language.” It doesn’t just
sound crazy, the CBO says that it is. Without the actual legislative language, any CBO review of the bill “does not constitute a comprehensive cost estimate” and makes it impossible to get an accurate sense of the cost. When CBO said they would need two weeks to do another formal cost estimate of the amended bill, Baucus balked.
It's not just the CBO who won't get a chance to look over the bill. Senate Democrats voted down an amendment by Sen. Jim Bunning (R., Kent.) that would have required that, after mark-up, the final language be made available to the public for 72 hours on the Internet. Senator Baucus says he’s against putting the bill online because that, too, would take two weeks.
