A group of “senior administration officials” held a conference call with reporters yesterday to discuss President Obama’s proposal to cut $17 billion in spending from next year’s $3.5 trillion budget. Many of the cuts proposed by Obama were also proposed last year by President Bush, whose efforts failed. So a reporter asked, “Why do you think you’re going to have more success this year than President Bush had in the past?”
The answer: That was then, and this is now. “Clearly a key thing is congressional support for these changes,” the official said. “None of this is going to be easy and no one ever pretended that it would be. But we are trying to do the right thing here and I think the context has significantly changed. I will again say, for example, Speaker Pelosi has tasked her committee chairs with reporting back on ways to save money by the beginning of June. So the effort to look for efficiencies is not just the administration, it’s working in concert with the Congress.”
Translated, that means Democrats wouldn’t do this for Bush, but they’ll do it for us. Do people at the White House really believe that? Maybe they do.
Later, another reporter asked, “Seventeen billion dollars in the context of $3.55 trillion — a lot of people might ask, is this really the best you can do?” The first answer from the official was, “Seventeen billion dollars, I think, is to anyone’s accounting a significant amount of money. Again, that’s in one year alone.”
But the larger answer was that the Obama administration will rack up really big savings by implementing health care reform. “For example, in Medicare Advantage, where we’re proposing more than $175 billion over 10 years in savings from reducing subsidies to — that are excessive for the private plans that operate under Medicare,” the official said. “And frankly, the big money is in affecting the rate of growth of health care costs and that is why we are so focused on getting health care reform done this year.”
The “big money.” Each day it becomes clearer that Barack Obama is betting the fiscal health of the nation on his ability to enact universal or near-universal health care and, in the process of extending expensive health coverage to millions of currently-uncovered Americans, save money in the process. It’s the bet that will determine not only the nation’s fiscal health, but the fate of Obama’s presidency as well.
