2074 Pages… And senators will have a full three days to read it before voting.

WHITE HOUSE MASTER TO SLASH EXEC PAY

Gaffes in federal reports this week about stimulus have called into question the government’s ability to accurately track how many jobs are being created by the massive $787 billion Recovery Act.

The data in Thursday’s reports were filled with mistakes, including an error that made it look like a French vaccine maker received the largest stimulus contract, $1.4 billion, when in fact it has gotten an award one-100th the size.

Government research organization OMB Watch said its assessment of the reports revealed many inconsistencies in the job data.

“The data is rife with mistakes,” said Craig Jennings, senior federal fiscal policy analyst at OMB Watch. “When you put out data that hasn’t yet been checked, it undermines transparency, because you are putting out wrong information.”

…A mistake in the very first contract listed on the site prompted doubts about the reliability of the reports.

Recovery.gov erroneously reported Thursday that French vaccine maker Sanofi Pasteur had received $1.4 billion in stimulus funds from the Department of Health and Human Services. The company topped the site’s list titled “Largest federal contracts in U.S.”

When CNNMoney.com first asked about the contract Thursday, a spokeswoman from Sanofi Pasteur suspected the $1.4 billion figure was a mistake. HHS spokeswoman Vicki Rivas-Vazquez said the number on recovery.gov was erroneous and the actual amount was $10.4 million.

Sanofi Pasteur said Friday that $10.4 million is the correct figure.

“We anticipated errors in the reporting and so informed many reporters beforehand,” said Edward Pound, spokesman for the Recovery Board. “This is the first time this kind of reporting is being done. These reports are being reviewed by federal agencies and recipients to catch any errors or problems.”

The Recovery Board has the tall task of compiling all of the data, and is spending $18 million revamping its Web site to manage all of the information.

OMB Watch said its review yielded “really weird job numbers,” including many discrepancies within the reports themselves. For instance, Jennings said OMB Watch found that many companies said in a narrative portion of their reports that it was able to retain several employees because of stimulus funds, but the “jobs created” column read “zero.”

The Recovery Board aggregates its jobs data from the “jobs created” column to display the total number of jobs saved or created. Jennings speculated that recipients might have been confused about the scope of the term “created.”

“I would not stake any sort of claims on those job numbers,” said Jennings. “We don’t know what’s going on there.”

FY 2009 Federal Deficit Terrifyingly Huge

after reading the links within that link, this will make perfect sense:

That’s a little like resuscitating a guy who had a heart attack on the way to his execution. Yeah, he’s alive but for how much longer?

When confronted with something this unsustainable there’s only two things to be done.

1- Spend untold trillions more taking over the nation’s health insurance system.

and

2- Blame Bush.

Obama to conservatives: Grab a mop and help me clean up your mess

The good news: The “socialist mop” line made me laugh. The bad news: He’ll be telling us it’s our mess that he’s cleaning up until, oh, 2015 or so at the earliest. How he’s planning to blame the stimulus waste or inevitable cost overruns on health care on the right isn’t yet clear to me, but have faith. He’ll find a way. It’s … what he does.

Question: Given the electoral realities in Congress these days, is it really the right that’s his biggest pain in the ass?

The Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation has analyzed the excise tax in the Baucus plan and come to the logical conclusion that it will raise prices for insurance policies. In two letters issued yesterday, the JCT acknowledged that the increased premium costs for health-insurance plans that qualify for the excise tax will increase costs to employers offering them, depressing wages directly or indirectly as a result, depending on whether they impose the total cost increase on employees. The second letter demonstrates that the effect of the Baucus plan and its disappearing subsidies on lower-income workers is to force them into a higher tax bracket, disincentivizing gains in employment.

Follow the link to HotAir to read more analysis.

CBO now estimates that implementing a typical package of tort reform proposals nationwide would reduce total U.S. health care spending by about 0.5 percent (about $11 billion in 2009). That figure is the sum of a direct reduction in spending of 0.2 percent from lower medical liability premiums and an additional indirect reduction of 0.3 percent from slightly less utilization of health care services. (Those estimates take into account the fact that because many states have already implemented some of the changes in the package, a significant fraction of the potential cost savings has already been realized.)

Enacting a typical set of proposals would reduce federal budget deficits by roughly $54 billion over the next 10 years, according to estimates by CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee of Taxation. That figure includes savings of roughly $41 billion from Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, as well as an increase in tax revenues of roughly $13 billion from a reduction in private health care costs that would lead to higher taxable wages.

Please take the time to read the entire blog posting at the link provided

Big Government » Blog Archive » AMA Endorses Largest Denier of Health Care Claims.

Sen. Thomas Carper (D.-Del.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, told CNSNews.com that he does not “expect” to read the actual legislative language of the committee’s health care bill because it is “confusing” and that anyone who claims they are going to read it and understand it is fooling people.

“I don’t expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life,” Carper told CNSNews.com.

Carper described the type of language the actual text of the bill would finally be drafted in as “arcane,” “confusing,” “hard stuff to understand,” and “incomprehensible.” He likened it to the “gibberish” used in credit card disclosure forms.

As Drew points out, he is right:

Here’s the thing, he right. The actual wording of a law is incomprehensible because it refers to other laws, sections and subsections, striking some words adding others and on and on and on. But…we as citizens are expected to follow these laws. Try going to court and say, “Your honor, as Senator Carper says, ‘laws are confusing and hard stuff to understand’ so let me go.”

Good luck with that one.

ABC Notices Obama Administration’s Effort to Suppress Criticism of ObamaCare | NewsBusters.org.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to go to the Senate floor on Tuesday to call out the Obama administration for using the full power of a federal regulatory agency to suppress free speech — specifically, to silence Humana’s predictions about the impact of proposed ObamaCare cuts to the Medicare Advantage program — led ABC, but not CBS or NBC, to air a story on the “gag order.”

ABC’s story began with a McConnell soundbite (“’Shut up,’ the government says, ‘don’t communicate with your customers. Be quiet and get in line,’”), before reporter Jonathan Karl explained McConnell was referring to the “Department of Health and Human Services, telling insurance companies who serve Medicare recipients, to stop ‘misleading’ and ‘confusing’ mailings, saying, quote: ‘We are instructing you to immediately discontinue all such mailings, and remove any related materials from your Web sites.’”

Karl continued: “The extraordinary order comes in response to a mailing the Humana insurance company sent to customers in the Medicare Advantage program. The Humana mailing warned that because of Medicare cuts in the health care reform bills, quote, ‘millions of seniors and disabled individuals could lose many important benefits and services.’”

CBO: Medicare cuts mean benefit cuts

Only an idiot would conclude that $500 billion in cuts to Medicare over 10 years would mean no reduction in benefits.  We budgeted $413 billion for this year, which makes a $50 billion “savings” target about 12% of its budget.  Obama keeps talking about how efficient Medicare is compared to private health insurance, but how efficient can it be if he can slice 12% out of the budget without affecting benefits?  In comparison, private health insurers spend 96.7% of all income on care and administrative costs, with only a 3.3% average profit margin.

Elmendorf is speaking not just from hard data but also common sense.  Any attempt to get that level of “savings” from Medicare will necessarily cut the benefits going to its recipients. Trying to cast that as a myth is either an indication of mathematical incompetence, political dishonesty, or both.  It’s also worth noting that when previous administrations attempted to cut Medicare spending by much lower amounts, Democrats would scream from the rafters about Republicans trying to steal Medicare away from seniors.  In this case, the CBO confirms that Democrats have engaged in projection.

And what happens in the media when the CBO exposes the President as a mythmaker, not a mythbuster?  Well, it’s like the proverbial tree in the forest.  None of the major newspapers covered the story that ObamaCare means cuts in Medicare benefits.  Not one.

UPDATE:

Hmmm: Is the AARP getting “kickbacks” from Obamacare?

This week the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced it was investigating Humana for providing “misleading” information regarding the Administration’s proposed cuts to Medicare Advantage policies-and prohibited other Medicare Advantage plans from providing similar information on how Democrat health “reform” could take away their current coverage.

Yet the Administration’s edict prohibiting plans from communicating with their beneficiaries failed to include AARP, which sponsors a Medicare Advantage plan but has been a prime advocate of Democrats’ government takeover of health care-quite possibly because AARP has been supporting a health care overhaul from which it stands to gain overall handsomely. Even as AARP advocates for cutting Medicare Advantage plans by more than $150 billion, an analysis of the organization’s operations reveals that it stands to receive tens of millions of dollars at the expense of seniors’ medical care-with Democrats’ full approval:

* The Congressional Budget Office has previously estimated that the cuts to Medicare Advantage plans proposed in Democrats’ government takeover of health care (H.R. 3200) would cause millions of seniors to lose their current plan and enroll in government-run Medicare.

* Because the government-run Medicare benefit is less generous than most private health plans, the independent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission found in June that more than nine in ten seniors not in nursing home settings utilize some form of Medicare supplemental insurance. While many of these individuals currently rely on Medicare Advantage plans for the extra benefits they provide to seniors, many would be forced to purchase supplemental Medigap policies should their existing Medicare Advantage plans be taken away from them due to Democrats’ government takeover of health care.

* A review of its financial statements finds that in 2008, AARP received more than half a billion dollars in revenue from selling products like Medigap supplemental insurance policies-$652.7 million in direct “royalties and fees,” and an increase of more than 31 percent from the $497.6 million in similar revenue AARP generated in 2007.

* Royalty revenues now comprise more than half-60.3 percent-of all AARP revenues; a Bloomberg news analysis published in December found that in 1999, royalties comprised only 11 percent of the organization’s total revenues.

* The Bloomberg article-which highlighted what one observer called AARP’s “dirty little secret”-profiled seniors who felt betrayed after paying hundreds of dollars above market price for AARP-branded coverage. One noted that “AARP has great buying power, and people should be able to get the best deal….This is unconscionable, what AARP has allowed to happen.” Another disillusioned senior wrote to the organization’s leadership asking whether AARP had a “‘special relationship’ with [insurance carriers] by which it receives commissions, incentives, rebates, or dare I say ‘kickbacks?’”-and when he arrived at AARP headquarters for a tour, was promptly escorted out of the marble-covered atrium.

* While H.R. 3200 would place strict price controls on Medicare Advantage plans-requiring them to pay out 85 percent of premium revenues in medical claims-Medigap policies face a far less strict 65 percent requirement. In other words, under the Democrat bill, seniors could pay as much as 20 cents more out of every premium dollar to fund “kickbacks” to AARP-sponsored Medigap plans than Medicare Advantage plans.

The higher prices charged by AARP plans, and the organization’s increasing dependence upon revenue from “royalties,” provide tangible evidence why AARP would support cuts to Medicare Advantage that would likely increase their “kickbacks” from Medigap plans.