One of the key aspects of the Baucus’s health-care-reform bill is the claim that is that it was scored by the CBO as not only revenue neutral but that it would save $49 billion over the next ten years. This is not without some controversy, as Megan McArdle notes:

The real game changer is that the CBO is willing to score health care savings on the grounds that the bill contains automatic spending cuts.
Conservatives are filled with rage and anguish. The spending cuts, they argue, mostly will not be done, which means that this bill is going to cost hundreds of billions more than its proponents claim. They are absolutely right: the savings cuts will not be made, and I doubt that many in the Democratic party leadership, or the liberal wonkosphere believe that they will.

Further, the bill is only revenue neutral as it stands. The bill has started to go through mark-up and there are 500+ ammendments to the bill currently being offered. As Tevi Troy notes over on NRO’s Critical Condition blog (Check it out!):

Today his committee will start looking at over 500 amendments, many, if not most, of which would increase the package’s cost, and he has already given up more than half his [$49 billion] cushion, before even starting the meeting. I will be very curious to see the CBO score after the committee session is over.

Indeed, just to put this into perspective — here are the papers relating to the amendments that they were handing out to the press at the Senate Finance Committee’s hearing today:

The document that gives one-line descriptions of the each of proposed amendments runs to 43 pages alone.