'New math' on health reform

President Barack Obama deserves credit for insisting that health care reform not add to the federal deficit. His allies on the Senate Finance Committee deserve credit for trying to meet that demand in a bill that it approved by a 14-9 margin Tuesday. But that doesn't mean Americans, including federal lawmakers, should fail to read between the lines of last week's Congressional Budget Office forecast that the legislation would reduce the deficit by $81 billion over the next 10 years.

As a Wall Street Journal front-page headline put it last week, that figure is a product of "new math." Among the numbers games that the writers of the $829 billion bill played to produce the desired outcome:

--$404 billion in Medicare cuts that supposedly will lower waste without lowering benefits.

--$201 billion from a 40 percent excise tax on insurers who provide some high-end plans.

--A wide array of additional annual "fees" (taxes would be a more accurate term) on insurers, medical-device manufacturers and drug companies.

--New limits on health care tax exemptions.

Those extra taxes would be passed on to consumers, according to a new analysis of the Senate bill released this week by the prestigious accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Commissioned by the American Health Insurance Plans industry group, which represents nearly 1,300 insurance companies, the study projects that the legislation would add $1,700 to an average family's annual coverage cost in 2013, the first year most of the bill would take effect.

The Senate bill is also is based on the faulty -- and familiar -- premise of vast Medicare savings. The far-fetched notion that Medicare costs will decline rather than ascend over time has been repeatedly disproved throughout the history of the program, which now faces looming fiscal disaster with the demographic crunch of Baby Boomer retirements.

And as columnist Rich Lowry pointed out on our Sunday Commentary page, the new CBO report contained this telling sentence: "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."

Just as long-term projections for Medicare costs have scant reliability, so do long-term projections of overall health care reform costs.

Again, though, at least the president and his congressional allies are trying to address those cost concerns. The president has even, over the last month or so, lowered his count of uninsured Americans from 46 million to 30 million. That's progress of a sort.

But don't count on the Senate bill that the finance committee approved Tuesday saving America -- and Americans -- any money in the long run.

Instead, consider the consistently dismal record of past "reforms" that were supposed to lower medical expenses and count on that legislation, if passed into law, plunging our nation even deeper into the health care red.