The Elephant in the Room: Health reform's hidden cost

Early Monday morning, President Obama hailed the passage of his health-care bill, saying, "This is what change looks like."

But is this the change Obama campaigned on?

Did he promise rising health-insurance premiums, new taxes on employers and investment, higher Medicare taxes, a government mandate that everyone buy insurance, more people on government-run health plans, trillions of dollars more in federal spending, backroom deals to buy votes, and (according to my analysis of the legislation) federal abortion subsidies that would increase the number of innocent deaths every year?

Obama has fulfilled his dream of making history, but he certainly has not delivered the change he promised the American people in 2008.

As a candidate, Obama promised to be bipartisan. But, for the first time in history, Congress has enacted an expansion of the government's role in our lives on the scale of the Social Security and Medicare programs with only Democratic votes. Both Social Security and Medicare passed with broad bipartisan support.

Obama promised to unite a divided America. But he has been completely dismissive of well-informed Americans' overwhelming opposition to this measure, forcing it down their throats.

Obama promised fiscal responsibility. But he has increased government spending over the next 10 years by more than $2 trillion, and his budget will add almost $10 trillion to the national debt over that period.

If record spending, an explosion of government, and the imposition of debt on the next generation don't faze you, maybe this will: Obama and the Democrats aren't done yet.

In the next few weeks, Congress will try to pass a reconciliation bill that will add almost $100 billion more in spending while delaying one of the health bill's major sources of tax revenue - the tax on "Cadillac" health plans - to a point so far down the road that it's unlikely a future Congress will implement it.

Once that's done, there will be a bill to increase Medicare reimbursements by $208 billion.

Huh? Didn't Obamacare just cut $375 billion from Medicare reimbursements?

In 1997, Congress passed a bill to cut Medicare doctor fees that the Congressional Budget Office expected to save hundreds of billions of dollars over the life of the program. But the measure never saved any money, because doctors threatened to drop their Medicare patients if the fees were cut.

Congress figured out that providing Medicare coverage is meaningless if there are no doctors who actually accept it. So it restores the reduced Medicare funding every year.

Given this track record, why should we believe that the just-passed $375 billion in Medicare reductions, scheduled to take effect a few years from now, will ever happen?

The $208 billion "doc fix," which is expected to be passed after the health-care bill, was originally included in Obamacare, but it was taken out to hide the true cost of the bill. It will also serve as a must-pass vehicle to which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can add even more health-care spending. That's right - even more spending!

That's because most of the spending in the health-care bill was delayed for four years - again, to hide the true cost of the bill. But Democrats already fear that voters won't see much change in the system until after Election Day 2012, so they will try to accelerate some of the health-care spending.

That may not be the end of the spending spree. After some members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus threatened to vote against the health-care bill because it doesn't allow illegal immigrants to buy health coverage on new insurance exchanges, the president promised to bring up comprehensive immigration reform soon. So don't be surprised to see at least some coverage allowed for 12 million illegal aliens later this summer, costing even more.

The irony in all this is that more than a dozen moderate Democrats said they agreed to vote for the health-care bill Sunday because the Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would reduce the deficit by $138 billion.

But none of this is irreversible. We are still a government of the people. Come November, we have an obligation to remind President Obama of that fact.