Instead of shoveling the gigantic amount of snow accumulating around and on top of my house, I read this very good article by AEI’s Andrew Biggs in The American. Biggs explains how the health-care numbers in Obama’s FY2011 budget are a total manupulation of the truth in order to achieve a political goal — the public takeover the health care. He writes:

For the first time by any administration in memory, the Obama budget forecast rejects the Medicare Trustees’ projections for long-run healthcare cost growth. The reason: the Trustees’ projections undercut the administration’s narrative that increased federal control over private sector healthcare could painlessly reduce Medicare and Medicaid costs. The Obama budget instead assumes long-term health cost growth at twice the rate projected by the Trustees.

How much manipulation are we talking about?

The rate of health cost growth per beneficiary combines with population aging, which swells the number of beneficiaries, to raise overall Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending. The Medicare Trustees have for years projected that per capita health costs will grow around 1 percent faster than gross domestic product. In health experts’ lexicon, “excess cost growth” will equal “GDP plus 1 percent. . . .
The 2011 Obama budget, by contrast, assumes per capita health costs will grow at GDP plus 2 percent, double the Trustees’ rate. The effects of this change are staggering: the administration’s 2010 budget, which followed the Trustees assumptions, projected Medicare costs of 9.6 percent of GDP by 2080. The 2011 budget, which uses White House assumptions, projects Medicare will consume 22 percent of GDP by 2085.”

In short, the administration intentionally decided to ignore the fact that population aging is by far the biggest contributor to entitlement spending over the next several decades, and that Obamacare won’t do anything to address this problem.

Read this very good and disturbing piece.