I can only wonder what he might say today if he were keeping score over how much money could be saved or lost by the passage of President Obama’s health care overhaul plan.

 

To hear my colleagues across the aisle tell it, the new program will reduce the federal deficit by some $230 billion over ten years. Without speculating on people’s motivations, let’s just say the calculations employed by them to reach this number are a bit creative.

 

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) was even blunter, calling one portion of that arithmetic, “a Ponzi scheme Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.”  Senator Conrad was speaking of a plan to borrow money from this new program to provide federal insurance that would help cover the costs for long-term care of the elderly and disabled. He was reacting to plans that would permit the government to borrow the money paid as insurance premiums for this program and to then, in turn, spend that same money.

 

Essentially, this borrowed money is being counted twice; first, as an asset, when it comes into the insurance program’s account, and then, again, when the federal government borrows it.  In the meantime, the program’s unpaid bills continue to pile up.  But nobody’s counting that.

 

It’s the kind of fuzzy math that gave Madoff a 150-year prison sentence.

 

The House Budget Committee, that employs a lot of smart people, has reached a sharply different conclusion – that when you strip away the fuzzy math and creative accounting, the health care overhaul plan could deepen the deficit by about $700 billion over the next decade.

 

To give this some perspective, $700 billion would buy and equip about two dozen of the newest class of aircraft carriers, the first of which, the Gerald R. Ford, is scheduled to take to the seas in four years.

 

While we don’t need that many aircraft carriers, we do have national debt that is strangling future economic growth. One thing is clear, funding an enormous and expensive health care overhaul plan that was thrown together in a hurry and presented to a nation that’s not convinced it’s necessary was short-sighted.

 

While there may be pieces of the health care plan that are worthy of consideration, they should be absolutely necessary, pursued a piece at a time and not supported by using fuzzy math.