Do O & Pelosi Have the Votes ? uh, maybe not...

Exclusive: House Minority Leader John Boehner on the Health-Care Vote [Robert Costa]

EXCLUSIVE — Rep. John Boehner (R., Ohio), the House minority leader, tells National Review Online that as of late Thursday afternoon, Democratic leadership “still doesn’t have the votes” to pass their health-care bill, and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) is “prepared to sacrifice her members, and her speakership, so that she can plant the flag of universal health care in the ground.” Boehner says this weekend will be a waiting game — “If the speaker doesn’t have 216 votes locked down, she will not go to the floor. If she’s short, she knows that there is no way she can pick up two or three votes on the floor.” On that same point, he admits that “if this comes to the floor, it’s already over…though I still don’t know how she can get there [to 216].…I’d never put myself in this box.”

“The right is mad, the middle is mad, and the left is mad,” Boehner says. “They’ve made a calculation: They know they won’t get the right or middle, so they saying to their members that they need their left, because if they lose the left, their base will sit home. The president is staying in town because he knows the left will kill him if he’s not here to help.”

Boehner adds that Pelosi has “made a big mistake by talking about this gimmicky way to pass this without having a real vote.” President Obama, he says, “has put all of his marbles, literally all of his marbles, on jamming through something the people don’t want” and has “arrogantly misjudged this entire issue from the start.” Here’s why, Boehner says: “The Left sees this as their best opportunity in 50 years to put their stamp on the direction of this country.”

Boehner believes that abortion will be the key complication for on-the-fence Democrats in the final hours. “I’ve always thought that this would be the issue,” he says. “This is public funding for abortion. They know it can’t be fixed. There just aren’t the votes in the Senate.” He says he respects pro-life congressman Bart Stupak (D., Mich.) for holding firm, but cautions that he “never thought that Stupak could hold ten to twelve votes.”

Boehner says there will be major political consequences for pro-life Democrats who break from the Stupak bloc. “Take [Rep.] Steve Driehaus, for example,” he says. “He may be a dead man. He can’t go home to the west side of Cincinnati. The Catholics will run him out of town.”

If Boehner is “lucky enough to become speaker,” he says he plans to work to repair the “damage to the institution” that the health-care debate has caused over the past year. “It will be different,” he pledges. “We’d run this different than how it is run today, and from how my predecessors ran it. We’ve got to make this government smaller and less costly. There are big problems to address. It’s been shocking how people have been paying attention to the process, and we’ve noticed. We’ll repeal this — we’ll put a bill on the floor to take out the Medicare cuts, the tax increases, and the individual mandates.”

A final message for the weekend? “Kill the bill, just kill the bill,” he says. To do that, he says the NRCC is running a “Code Red” project, robocalls are going out, and members are going on local radio shows and hosting telephone town halls — in Democratic districts. “It’s all targeted,” he says.


CBO on $1.2 Trillion: ‘No’ [Robert VerBruggen]

Over at Critical Condition, Hanns Kuttner notes that while the Democrats attribute their claim that health-care reform will cut the deficit by $1.2 trillion in its second ten years to the Congressional Budget Office, this estimate is nowhere to be found in the CBO report itself. It seems that the Democrats took the CBO’s estimate that deficit reduction could fall “in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP,” matched it up to some estimates of GDP in 2020–2029, and attributed their back-of-the-envelope math to the CBO itself.I e-mailed a source within the CBO to ask if they had arrived at the $1.2 trillion figure themselves.

The source e-mailed back one word: “No.”


Show Me the Money, Cont'd [Daniel Foster]

The always worthwhile Megan McArdle has her own take on the CBO report. In the same spirit as I wondered whether Ezra Klein literally believes, as a matter of fact, that Obamacare will cut health costs and reduce the deficit, McArdle doubts whether Democrats believe (or even care) that they can keep the bill's fiscal promises.
On the topic of the Cadillac Tax:

The proposed changes increase spending dramatically, most heavily concentrated in the out-years. The gross cost of the bill has risen from $875 billion to $940 billion over ten years—but almost $40 billion of that comes in 2019. The net cost has increased even more dramatically, from $624 billion to $794 billion. That's because the excise tax has been so badly weakened. This is of dual concern: it's a financing risk, but it also means that the one provision which had a genuine shot at "bending the cost curve" in the broader health care market has at this point, basically been gutted. Moreover, it's hard not to believe that the reason it has been moved to 2018 is that no one really thinks it's ever going to take effect. It's one thing to have a period of adjustment. But a tax that takes effect in eight years is a tax so unpopular that it has little realistic chance of being allowed to stand.

And, on whether the promised Medicare cuts will ever come:

. . .Ultimately, this rests on the question: are we really going to cut Medicare? If we're not, this gargantuan new entitlement is going to end up costing us about $200 billion a year next decade, which even in government terms is an awful lot of money. There are offsetting taxes, but they're either trivial or likely to be unpopular—look forward to a 4% rent increase when your landlord has to stump over the same amount for the new tax on rents. Then look forward to repeal of same.

I think this is a fiscal disaster waiting to happen. But no one on the other side cares, so I'm not sure how much point there is in saying that any more.
Read it all here.