Power Line Dissects Obama's Health Care Speech

Excerpt:

Actually, the administration has said that around half the cost of the plan, $500 billion, would be paid for by cuts in Medicare. So it isn't exactly "demagoguery and distortion" to suggest that there might be cuts in Medicare.

[N]ot a dollar of the Medicare trust fund will be used to pay for this plan.

I should hope not, since there isn't any Medicare trust fund, just like there isn't any Social Security trust fund.

The only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud...Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan.

But wait! If we can identify hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid and we know how to eliminate it, why haven't we done so already? Why don't we do so--right now!--regardless of the administration's highly controversial health care bill?

There is no possible answer to these questions. The Obama plan--whatever it is, once reduced to writing--depends for most of its financing on the bare assertion that we are currently wasting hundreds of billions of dollars, and that we will stop wasting that money only if taxpayers knuckle under to Obamacare.

This was not, to put it kindly, a speech that was directed at thinking people.