Cato wonders if Obama has read his own health care overhaul

Does President Obama have any idea what's in his own health-care reform law?

Since he signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act a bit more than 100 days ago, the president has given a number of speeches and interviews in which he continues to say things that, well, just aren't so. Just last Friday, he told MSNBC's Chuck Todd that the law "not only makes sure everybody has access to coverage but is reducing costs."

Wrong on both counts.

The bill doesn't come close to giving "everybody" access to coverage. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 10 years from now there will still be at least 21 million uninsured Americans. That's an improvement over today, but it's a far cry from the universal coverage that Obama once promised.

[T]he law will add significantly to the already crushing burden of government spending, taxes and debt.

And nearly half of the newly covered aren't getting access to true health insurance but are being added to the Medicaid program, with all of its attendant problems of access and quality.

Indeed, access to health care may be about to get harder. The RAND Corporation reports that the new law may result in severe overcrowding and longer waits in emergency rooms.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services warn that some of the mandated cuts in Medicare could result in the closing of up to 15 percent of US hospitals.

We've already seen a near doubling in the waiting time to see a doctor under Massachusetts' universal health-care law, which is very similar to ObamaCare.

Even further from reality is the president's continued insistence that the new law is "reducing costs." In fact, the administration's own chief health-care actuary reports that the law will actually raise US health-care spending by $311 billion over 10 years. This failure to control costs means that the law will add significantly to the already crushing burden of government spending, taxes and debt.

Accurately measured, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will cost more than $2.7 trillion over its first 10 years of full operation and add more than $352 billion to the national debt. This doesn't even include more than $4.3 trillion in costs shifted to businesses, individuals and state governments.

Anyone who thinks that their insurance premiums will be going down in the foreseeable future is going to be disappointed. The law does nothing to restrain the growth in insurance costs. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says that premiums will double over the next six years, roughly the same rate of increase as would have occurred without health-care reform.

Flawed $36 billion AIG bailout would have paid for 47 years of breast cancer research or eight Nimitz-class aircraft carriers

Today the Congressional Oversight Panel released a new report on the fall 2008 bailout of AIG, and its findings are damning for the federal regulators responsible for the bailout. The report claimed that the bailout has had a "poisonous" effect on markets, and released this laundry list of regulatory malfeasance, from the Huffington Post:

· Policymakers had several options to resolve the firm's troubles, rather than a "binary" choice of bailout or failure;

· Federal regulators could have acted earlier, potentially saving taxpayers from a $182 billion investment in the giant insurer;

· The government-led private-sector effort to save the firm primarily relied on just two financial firms and a small group of law firms rife with conflicts of interest;

· Policymakers involved in the rescue continue to change their public rationale for rescuing AIG with taxpayer cash, perhaps for political considerations;

· Even more foreign banks than previously disclosed were direct beneficiaries of the taxpayer bailout;

· It was "unlikely" a more muscular regulatory agency would have caught the insurer's problems given that the firm's own management didn't know what was going on;

· And despite the panel's mission of auditing how the government responded to its biggest intrusion in the financial markets since the Great Depression, some firms, including Goldman Sachs, which taxpayers bailed out with $10 billion in cash and nearly $21 billion in debt guarantees, continue to refuse to turn over key documents, the panel said in its report. Goldman faces a multitude of investigations regarding its subprime-era practices.

One of the Panel's members, J. Mark McWatters (who replaced Rep. Jeb Hensarling), added some details about the AIG bailout's cost to taxpayers in the report:

Other than the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the rescue of AIG has required the allocation of more taxpayer funded resources than any other similar action undertaken by the government since the inception of the current economic crisis.

McWatters then notes that the CBO has quadrupled its estimate of the cost of the TARP investment in AIG just in the past few months, from $9 billion to $36 billion, a troubling fact considering that market conditions have only improved since the bailout was initiated. He also adds some context to those numbers:

As I have done in prior reports, I think that it is instructive to add some perspective to the magnitude of the loss the taxpayers may suffer as a result of the AIG bailout. By comparison, for fiscal year 2011 the National Institute of Health (NIH) has requested $765 million for breast cancer research, and the latest Nimitz-class aircraft carrier commissioned by the Navy cost approximately $4.5 billion. It is entirely appropriate for the taxpayers who funded the TARP program to ask if the bailout of AIG with a CBO estimated cost of $36 billion merited 47 years of breast cancer research or eight (8) Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. The "guns v. butter v. AIG" comparisons clearly demonstrate that our national resources are indeed limited and that the bailout of AIG will require the government to reduce expenditures, increase tax revenue or both.

Obama: accounting is an "inexact science," phantom districts and errors a "side issue"

President Obama brushed off criticism over his administration's inaccurate reporting on job creation Wednesday, telling Fox News the accounting is an "inexact science" and that any errors are a "side issue" when compared with the goal of turning the economy around. He said job growth is his No.1 responsibility.

Al Gore's fans shut down an inconvenient question

Former Vice President Al Gore shared his optimism about the "shifting momentum" of the climate change debate with about 500 environmental journalists Friday in Madison.

(snip)

"We're very close to that political tipping point," Gore said at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference at the Madison Concourse Hotel. "Never before in human history has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions."

In what organizers said was a rarity, Gore took half a dozen questions
from journalists, including one from Phelim McAleer, an Irish filmmaker who asked Gore to address nine errors in his film identified by a British court in 2007.

Gore responded that the court ruling supported the showing of his film in British schools. When McAleer tried to debate further, his microphone was cut off by the moderators.