By Philip Klein on 6.11.09 @ 6:09AM
It's hard to trust the health care claims of an administration
when its economic stimulus projections are already proving to be
wrong.
The biggest obstacle President Obama faces in selling his health
care agenda could be the albatross of his own economic stimulus
package.
During its last major sales push, the Obama administration
promised the $787 billion stimulus legislation would create up to
4 million jobs over the next two years, serve as a model of
transparency, and be free of earmarks. But those claims haven't
held up so well.
In the months since Obama signed the bill in February, more than
1.6 million jobs have been lost. His own vice president, Joe
Biden, tasked with overseeing the implementation of the stimulus
package,
declared last week that "We know some of this money is going
to be wasted.…Some people are being scammed already."
Meanwhile, USA Today
reported that lawmakers were working behind the scenes to
make sure that money gets directed to their own pet projects,
such as "$5 million for the removal of pine trees killed by bark
beetles in Colorado."
There are signs of a growing public skepticism about the stimulus
package. A Rasmussen
poll released on Wednesday found that 45 percent of Americans
favor canceling the rest of the stimulus money, compared to just
36 percent who disagree and 20 percent who aren't sure.
A single poll should be taken with a grain of salt, to be sure.
But the fact that the public relations-savvy Obama administration
felt the need to begin the week with a media blitz rebooting the
stimulus effort suggests White House officials sense Americans
are getting antsy.
Monday's campaign-like stunt featured a cabinet meeting, a new
website, and a
special report dubbed "Roadmap to
Recovery." The administration claimed to have "created or
saved" 150,000 jobs within the first 100 days of the stimulus
bill being signed, and promised 600,000 more over the summer, in
the second 100 days.
Biden, in a
conference call with reporters on Monday, said it was "above
[his] pay grade" to explain in detail the methodology the White
House uses to estimate the number of jobs created or saved by the
economic stimulus legislation. He said that the Council of
Economic Advisers makes its estimates based on measuring what the
U.S. employment level would have been without the stimulus, and
then comparing it to the nation's actual employment level.
"I'm sorry I'm not an economist," Biden said as he was trying to
describe the methodology. "My background is foreign policy and
the constitution."
He added, "the fact is that there has been no challenge to the
methodology the Council of Economic Advisers has come up with,
known to national economists as being reasonable to the estimates
we have as to the actual jobs saved or created."
But the administration's employment estimates have already proven
to be way off. In selling the legislation, the administration
projected that if the stimulus package were passed, unemployment
would be about 8 percent right now. In reality, it's 9.4 percent.
Even Biden's own chief economic adviser, Jared Bernstein,
concedes they made a boo boo.
"[A]t the time our forecast seemed reasonable," Bernstein
said in a Monday press conference. "Now, looking back,
it was clearly too optimistic."
Now, the same team that brought us the stimulus is embarking on a
campaign to remake the nation's $2.4 trillion health care sector
with a new set of bold promises.
In making its case, the White House has argued that the
government can provide everybody with health care coverage while
saving money, and that it can do so while improving the quality
of care and without rationing. President Obama advocates a system
in which individuals are offered government subsidies to purchase
insurance on a government-run insurance exchange, allowing them
to choose between a government-run plan and "private" plans that
are designed by the government. And yet we're supposed to believe
that this won't lead to a government takeover of medicine.
A health care bill along the lines of what Obama promised during
the campaign has been estimated to cost upwards of
$1.5 trillion over ten years, but his budget only identified
$635 billion available to pay for it. Of that money, the budget
proposed raising $326 billion by capping the tax deductions for
charitable contributions for the wealthy and closing other
loopholes, an idea that was rejected by the Democratic Congress.
The other $309 billion consists of proposed savings by cutting
overpayments to Medicare Advantage as well as the old standby of
"cutting waste, fraud and abuse" in government health care
programs.
In a
letter to Democratic Senators Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus last
week, Obama said he would support finding ways to reduce Medicare
and Medicaid spending by an additional $200 billion to $300
billion, though he did not specify how those savings would be
generated.
Americans should be asking themselves whether they can trust the
health care claims of the same administration that projected an 8
percent unemployment rate and ended up with a 9.4 percent rate,
and claimed to be creating (or saving!) 150,000 jobs during a
period when more than 1.6 million were lost.
"You can't just make stuff up," candidate Barack Obama declared
last fall, in responding to Sarah Palin. Now, with health care as
with the stimulus package, his administration is doing its best
to test that hypothesis.
topics:
Health Care, The Obama Administration, Stimulus Package, Unemployment
