Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, told Newsmax.TV’s Ashley Martella that both the House and the Senate bills passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress are full of “smoke-and-mirror” regulations that will stymie hospitals and doctors’ attempts to enact cost-cutting measures.
• “This year, doctors in Medicare are going to get cut 21 percent in their fees. Everyone is trying to fix that. That’s $371 billion. What did the Democrats do — they took it out of this legislation and are moving it as a separate piece of legislation. So they have hidden $371 billion of spending right there.
• “Here is a second thing they are doing, which CBO [Congressional Budget Office] has no control over, 10 years of tax increases and Medicare cuts to pay for six years of spending. They can manipulate a score anyway they want to to make it appear as if it’s not a deficit, but if you actually take away all the smoke and mirrors, all the gimmicks, the bill from our estimation costs about $460 billion in deficits in the first 10 years and about 1.4 trillion in deficits in the second 10 years.”
• “If you use real world economics and reality-based scoring, not the spreadsheets they cooked up to manipulate a score, this thing represents a big deficit increase and it makes healthcare costs go up, not down and that is not my opinion, that’s the opinion of the chief actuary of Medicare/Medicaid,” he contends.
(http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/ryan-healthcare-gop-obama/2010/02/25/id/350962 ).

Not to mention your figure is ridiculous to begin with. 45,000 people die per year for lack of health care? In a country of 300 million, that is a rate that any other country would kill to have. Hell, Britain’s health care system leaves more people unwashed and dying in a pool of their own filth for months at a time than that (See yesterday’s article on this on the Daily Caller).

Dr. Bailey

Dr. Bailey

http://www.topix.com/forum/city/dayton-oh/TJ7DPE9DQ2VIUPP68

For funny insight on the healthcare summit.