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They'll gladly have you pay today for cuts they won't make tomorrow
Betsy's Page — If anything shows the futility of expecting future cuts in federal health spending in order to balance out all the future spending that the Democrats are planning, the attempts by the Democrats to fix a political problem that Congress created for themselves 10 years ago. Dana Milbank ridicules the Democrats' attempt to fit the patch without admitting that they're spending close to $250 billion. A decade ago, Congress passed legislation designed to limit health-care costs by slowing the growth of Medicare payments to doctors. Each year, Congress passes a "patch" to prevent ...

A proud bipartisan tradition of budget gimmickry
Ezra Klein — This is an extremely strange paragraph from Dana Milbank: Senate Democrats wanted to protect doctors from scheduled cuts in Medicare payments over the next 10 years, but there was a problem: Doing so would add a quarter of a trillion dollars to the federal deficit, making mincemeat of Obama's promise. So Democrats hatched a novel scheme: They would pass the legislation separately, so the $250 billion cost wouldn't be part of the main reform "plan," thereby allowing the president to claim that that bill wouldn't increase the deficit. ...

Budget Busting
Megan McArdle — As more than one liberal blogger has noted, there's no particular reason that fixing Medicare's Sustainable Growth Rate--a failed attempt at mandated cost control that congress ritually repeals every year--should be attached to the budget for the health care reform bill.  We will have Medicare whether or not this bill passes, so it doesn't really figure as part of the budget. ...

Twisting With Hamid the Night Away, Rocky Mountain Highs
Notes From a Grumpy Old Man — ... Kathleen Parker Dana Milbank Andrew Kramer "The debate over whether Americans ought to have the right to be stupid -- or to make other people seem more interesting -- continues apace after 40 years of the (failed) "war on drugs." - Kathleen Parker "The United States has the most privatized health-care system in the advanced world, and also the least efficient."  - Paul Krugman The big story today is that the runoff election will ...