Fox News reports:
Obama boasted Monday that Democrats’ health care proposals would cut deficits by $1 trillion “over the next decade,” a flub that inflated the actual estimate by $868 billion. . .
“Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people’s premiums and brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion dollars over the next decade because we’re spending our health care dollars more wisely,” Obama told an audience at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., a suburb north of Philadelphia. . .
“Those aren’t my numbers . . . they are the savings determined by the Congressional Budget Office, which is the nonpartisan, independent referee of Congress for what things cost.”
But the budget office did not say the Senate health care bill would save $1 trillion over the next decade — or even close to that figure.
It estimated the bill would save $132 billion from 2010 to 2019, leaving Obama’s “next decade” estimate $868 billion short.
When contacted about this disparity, a White House official said Obama meant to say the Senate bill would save $1 trillion in its second decade — a projection that would more closely match congressional analysts’ estimates.
Keep in mind that the CBO’s savings estimates are nonsense too, since they depend on counterfactuals like a reduction in Medicare reimbursements and rely on static models of economic behavior.
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