Dig In!

The 152-page Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 (PDF) is now available at the website of the House Rules Committee. If you read it in conjunction with the 2,409-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PDF), approved by the Senate in December, and the CBO's preliminary analysis (PDF) of the two bills (only 25 pages!), you can finally see what President Obama has in mind when he talks about "health care reform." But don't worry: The president promises you will have "many days" to digest it all before your representative votes on it. This weekend.

Addendum: The Republican members of the House Budget Committee have a three-page response to the CBO analysis here (PDF). In addition to the points I mentioned earlier today, they note several other tricks that the Democrats use to undercount spending and exaggerate savings, including frontloading taxes and Medicare cuts while backloading insurance subsidies. "When you strip away the double-counting of Medicare cuts, the so-called savings from Social Security payroll taxes, and the CLASS Act [premiums for long-term care insurance]," their analysis says, "the deficit increases by $433 billion over the first ten years."