More Lies From Max Baucus

Today's release of the latest CBO "scoring" of Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee health care bill had the chairman grinning, claiming the bill is "paid for."

Yeah, right. More lies from Washington. More lies from Baucus.

Baucus' bill and statements are misleading on so many levels.

For example, Karl Rove pointed out the following in just a few minutes on Sean Hannity's Fox News program last night.

-The current Senate bill mandates huge taxes on so-called "Cadillac" health care plans. Many people possessing these plans are union workers, and the House has vowed that it will not tax these plans. So you either have taxes that Wonderboy said won't be levied, or a bill that suddenly is about $200B more in the red.

-The so-called 10-year scoring back loads "benefits," but front loads taxes, so the true spending is not counted, it being in further out years beyond the initial ten years.

-The usual, mythical cuts in current Medicare "waste and fraud" are used to pay for hundreds of billions of dollars of the bill's expenses. Since Congress has never seen fit to actually reduce any of this "waste and fraud," it is simply not credible that, now, it will vanish, to fund this bill.

-This bill is only a Senate markup. It is calculated to simply make it out of the Senate and into conference with the House. The true, final bill will bear little resemblance to this one, so the CBO estimate won't really be relevant next month.

But even with all these financial considerations, this bill is wrong on some basics.

As with all the Democratic health care proposals, they ignore the easy, low-cost, non-system-wrecking options which include: provide tax preferenced health care premium treatment to all; allow interstate marketing of health insurance; institute tort reform to lower costs of defensive medicine; remove mandates, so people can buy precisely the insurance they desire.

None of these appear anywhere in Baucus' useless bill. Instead, it's a major grab for federal power to displace personal choice and liberty.

Baucus and the other Senate Democrats, and any Republican who votes for this pig, should be voted out of office.