perfidy

It depends on which ten days you look at!

If any of us tried this, the IRS would hit us so hard our granchildren would feel it. Our Fearless Leader's Fiscally Prudent And Unassailably Conservative Medicare plan will now cost north of One... Trillion... Dollars all told. In case you're confused, $1.2 Trillion is more than $720 Billion, which is another estimate, which is bigger in turn than the $400 Billion that we were all told - and none of us ever believed - the program would cost in the first place.

So how'd they do it? Simple! They lied!

When the Medicare bill was passed, the Congressional Budget Office said the cost would not exceed $400 billion over 10 years. In a letter to The New York Times published on Nov. 20, 2003, Thomas A. Scully, who was then the Medicare administrator, wrote, "We are spending $400 billion."

Just two months later, in January 2004, the White House said the cost, for the same 10-year period, would be $534 billion.

Dr. McClellan said Tuesday that "there has been no significant change in the cost of the drug benefit" for the years 2006 to 2013. But, he said, the new estimate covers two additional years, 2014 and 2015, when Medicare enrollment will be larger and drug prices will be higher. In 2015 alone, he said, Medicare will spend well over $100 billion on the drug benefit.

Assumptions about the cost of the Medicare drug benefit were included in the budget that Mr. Bush unveiled on Monday. A table in one volume of the budget, titled "Analytical Perspectives," shows the drug benefit as costing $345 billion from 2005 to 2010.

Lawmakers said they were shocked to see that number because it was close to the $400 billion figure they had previously been given as the price tag for a full decade. Estimates prepared by the chief Medicare actuary show that the spending for the prescription drug benefit will total $1.2 trillion from 2006 to 2015, before taking account of income that will offset some of that cost.

The best part of the foregoing is the ludicrous misdirection employed to sell the plan. See, the original estimate was from 2004-2013, which is in fact a ten year period - just not a ten year period in which the bill takes effect. The new new estimates cover the years 2006-2015, ten years in which the bill will be fully funded and the Giant Money Hoover fully operational. See how it works? Costs + Timeshift = Big Big Savings!

Let's say my car costs $10000, payable in monthly installments over five years.(Actually, it would cost me plenty more than that with interest factored in, but interest is haaaaaard so I will leave it aside for now.) If I say my car will cost me $10000 over five years, I can't just save some money by picking a random five-year window and computing the cost then (My car cost me $0 - free! - from 1888-1893). But the car is not free, and that $10000 is still due in a very real and binding sense, if I am going to continue having the dual pleasures of a car and a sound credit history. There's no getting around it. And yet, picking a time series at random seems to be good enough for government accounting.

I wonder if I could try this the next time I get audited. "Yes sir, I did make $0 last year. I only counted the hours from midnight-6 AM, and I made no money during that time. Why - is that a problem?"

[wik] Not to harp on this but... if these are the kinds of 'facts' that entered into the Bush administration's policy planning of Medicare reform, what other 'facts' are attached to other initiatives? Not that every President doesn't do it, but I seem to recall myself carping about the same tactic when Clinton used it, and Bush I before him. Before that, I only cared about GI Joe, rock guitar, and homework.