Marathon Pundit: WashPo: ObamaCare "cure" not addressing deficit problem

Did President Obama call for a health care reform plan that is deficit neutral?

He did.

The Reid health care plan just might be deficit neutral. Just might. But as the Washington Post reports, with a massive deficit "already driving the nation toward bankruptcy," the Senate ObamaCare bill doesn't address the deficit issue.

Optimists say the $848 billion package drafted by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) contains all the most promising ideas for transforming the health-care system and encouraging doctors and hospitals to work more efficiently. They say it would eventually reduce both private premiums and the swelling cost of government health care for the elderly and poor.

Even pessimists don't necessarily disagree. But they see scant evidence that those ideas would quickly bear fruit, and in the short term they fear that the initiative would leave Washington struggling to pay for a new $200 billion-a-year health program even as existing programs require vast infusions of cash to care for the aging baby-boom generation.

Those concerns were magnified by the release of Reid's bill, which the Senate will begin debating on Monday. Democrats were thrilled when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the package was fully "paid for" -- meaning lawmakers had identified spending cuts and tax increases sufficient to cover the cost of expanding coverage to 30 million additional people.

But the measure would not deliver on Democrats' most ambitious claims, the CBO found. While the package would not worsen the nation's record deficits, it would not significantly improve them, either now or in the future. Reid's bill would shave less than 2 percent from deficits projected to top $9 trillion over the next decade. And it would make only "small reductions" after that, the CBO said -- about 0.25 percent of GDP -- to deficits projected to balloon to roughly 14 percent of the economy by 2035.