Paul Krugman isn’t a stupid man. He is, however, such a slave to his ideology that he often makes claims for which the only appropriate adjective is ”dumb.” Yesterday, for example, he produced a blog post in which he made following preposterous assertion:
[T]he Medicare actuaries believe that the cost-saving provisions in the Obama health reform will make a huge difference to the long-run budget outlook … All the facts we have suggest that health reform was the biggest move toward fiscal responsibility in a long, long time.
This fails the laugh test. As NCPA’s John Goodman points out:
For the first time in Medicare history, the Medicare Chief Actuary has called the projections in a Medicare Trustees Report “unreasonable� and “implausible� and encouraged everyone to ignore them and view instead an “Illustrative Alternative� report.
Why would Medicare’s Chief Actuary take such an unusual step?
Noting that the formal Trustees report assumes Medicare physician fees will be reduced by 30% over the next three years, Chief Actuary Richard Foster says that’s “implausible.� In addition, the Trustees report assumes Medicare fees will fall below Medicaid rates by 2019 and fall further and further behind private payment rates in future years.
No one believes these assumptions. Arnold Kling puts it thus:
[E]ven if the Medicare cuts take place, it is double-counting to suggest that they will both save Medicare and pay for Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies … So I tend to think you have to be pretty gullible to believe that Obamacare will save money.
Indeed. And Krugman himself would be the first to denounce such double-counting if used by some Republican administration. When, however, it is deployed by the current regime in defense of a budget-busting boondoggle like ObamaCare, Krugman calls it “fiscal responsibility.”
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