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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The Congressional Budget Office now reports that this bill will reduce our deficit by $132 billion over the first decade and by as much as $1.3 trillion in the decade after that.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, R-KY, SENATE MINORITY LEADER: This bill is a mess. It is a cobbled together, special deal-riddled package that just underscores what people tend to think of Congress anyway, and this certainly underscores that impression.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRET BAIER, "SPECIAL REPORT" HOST: Well, just after 1:00 in the morning, the Senate voted 60-40 to end the debate on the Senate health care reform bill. It's the first and biggest hurdle for Senate Democrats to move this forward. Not a single Republican voted for it.
And you heard the president talking about the deficit cutting in this bill. It does that by removing the provisions to eliminate the cuts in doctor's reimbursements under Medicare, a separate $240 billion over ten years. The math is interesting as you look into this bill.
What is in it, what isn't? Let's bring in our panel, Steve Hayes, senior writer for the Weekly Standard, Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.
Mara, no real surprise on the vote because we knew what was going to happen, but what about what is in this after we have now looked at it for a day?
MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Well, there are a lot of things in it. We know the public option isn't in it and the Medicare expansion isn't in it. But there are a lot of health insurance reforms that are in it that I think there is a consensus on - no lifetime limits, you can't cut somebody out for preexisting conditions, or it makes it a lot harder to.
The health insurance industry will become like utilities that are very, very heavily regulated - how much of the money they take in can be spent on health care and how much can go into profits. There is a lot of reform in there.
Now, there also are higher taxes. Medicare taxes will go up on people making over $250,000 by I think 0.9 percent, and there is a tax on tanning salons. There is a -
BAIER: They took out the cosmetic surgery tax.
LIASSON: And moved it to the tanning salons.
But there also are big Medicare cuts, as you just mentioned. The big question is will those cuts stand? The history of Congress suggests they won't, especially the doc fix, and that's really the lynch pin of this. If everything in this bill actually happens, then that CBO estimate will be correct. If it doesn't, it won't.
BAIER: Charles.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: That CBO estimate is completely wrong, and when Obama cites it, he is being completely cynical.
Number one, the only reason it ends up with a surplus is because it strips out - well, it assumes that there will be cuts in reimbursements for doctors of 21 percent next year with no increase over a decade. They're 100 percent certain that is not going to happen, but it's in the bill because it will be a separate provision that will strip it out. So once you calculate that in, you're already in the red.
Secondly, and this is the most important, it supposedly costs $850 billion over ten years. But 98 percent of the costs of the bill are in the last six years. So it's a trick. If you actually look at real charges, you start in 2014 when the benefits kick in and you go out ten years, then the cost is not slightly under $1 trillion. It is $1.8 trillion or $2.5 trillion, which means it will blow an enormous hole in the deficit.
And everybody knows this. We heard Michael Steele say earlier, he's the head of the RNC, that these numbers are cooked because the head of the CBO was brought into the White House - I wish he hadn't said that, because that's not the reason. You don't have to corrupt the CBO. It's not. It's very honest.
You cook the books by presenting the assumption that the CBO is required to assume it will happen but what everybody understands is not going to happen. That's why the ostensible CBO number looks good. The real number is devastatingly in deficit.
BAIER: Steve, we heard in an interview late this afternoon that the president gave to American Urban Radio, he said, first of all, that he watched the vote at 1:00 a.m., and second of all, he said there isn't much difference between the House and Senate bill except the public option, and he essentially thinks that the House is just going to roll over and take the Senate bill as is.
STEVE HAYES, SENIOR WRITER, "THE WEEKLY STANDARD": I agree with half of what he says. I think there are some real differences but I do think that the House is going to roll over and basically give him what he wants.
The tricky part will be finding the people who support the Stupak amendment on abortions to support a Senate version or something like that, to reconcile those two kinds of - those two different versions of this.
I think you will get there. We have seen this with the Senate, we have seen this with the House on other provisions. You eventually get the Democratic Party leadership and the president putting on enough pressure and/or giving them goodies that people are going to roll.
Let me follow up on one thing that Charles said - it is not just that the real cost of this bill from 2014 to 2023 is $2.5 trillion. He is exactly right about that. It is the ultimate in the budget gimmicks.
But the taxes from that same amount of time are $1 trillion. People need to understand that by the time this actually kicks in, by the time the reform is real reform and we're paying real costs, the taxes are $1 trillion over that same real ten-year period from when this thing starts.
And the president said just a couple of weeks ago, "I have actually said that it is important for us to make sure this is deficit neutral without tricks. I said I wouldn't sign a bill that didn't meet that criteria." He knows that this is full of tricks. It is totally disingenuous for him to say what he said today.
LIASSON: The practice of starting the goodies later and the paying first to make something fit in the ten-year CBO window was not invented this year by the Democrats. I mean, it's not unlike the way the Bush tax cuts were paid for, because they stopped. They magically stopped.
HAYES: That's a fair point.
LIASSON: The fact is this is actually business as usual. This has been done for time immemorial because you have a ten-year window, and that's convenient, because you can put things outside of the window.
KRAUTHAMMER: It is business as usual except that it's a takeover of a sixth of the U.S. economy. It's not taxes that you can raise and lower. This is changing the structure of American medicine in a way that will be irreversible. And it's all done on tricks.
And that's why it is different and that's why it's important that it not happen, although I suspect it is now going to happen, and I can't see any way it's going to be stopped.
HAYES: And it is not just American medicine. It is changing the way the structure of the entire U.S. economy, U.S. businesses as well. And the thing that makes it especially different is that the president ran for more than a year on not doing things as business as usual. This was his primary appeal was to change the way things in Washington were going to work.
Now, some of us didn't believe he was actually going to do this, but when you run on it and win on it, you should be held to a different standard, indeed the standard he set for himself.
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