$313B "Saved Or Created?"

President Barack Obama's health care proposal is running into road blocks.  Today he attempts to get past one of them, the costs of government healthcare, by "saving or creating" $313B in money to fund the overhaul.

Obama on Saturday is announcing an additional $313 billion in new proposed savings that he says would bring the total funding available for his top-priority health insurance reform to nearly $950 billion over 10 years.

White House officials insisted the new savings were rock-solid, but also acknowledged they had yet to settle on a specific mechanism to achieve lower prescription drug costs that make up nearly one-quarter of the new savings....

White House was moving aggressively to counter public criticism that funding plans for the health reform effort are unrealistic, particularly in the face of an expected 10-year pricetag of $1 trillion or more. Some analysts have faulted the White House for being overly optimistic about savings and tone-deaf to which tax-raising proposals are likely to fly in Congress.

Tax and spend, baby.  And this latest salvo is even more overly optimistic.  This strikes me as just as believable a proposal as the claim that 600,000 more jobs will be "saved or created" next quarter.  Shouldn't Mr. Obama have to produce the savings first to justify spending those savings on nationalizing healthcare?  My favorite line in the article is this.

The bulk of the new $313 billion in savings would come from cutting or reducing the growth of payments to hospitals, medical equipment manufacturers and laboratories — though the major cuts don't target doctors, [OMB Director Peter] Orszag said.

Don't kid yourself.  Cuts in government healthcare spending have always targeted physicians in one way or another, to the point that many physicians now lose money on Medicare and Medicaid patients.  And some have opted out.

For more on why nationalizing healthcare is a bad idea, see David Gratzer in the WSJ, Karl Rove in the WSJ, and Tevi Troy in the WSJ, the latter on why it's a bad idea to force prices down aggressively in prescription drugs.  And then there is the whole "public option" thing, which is really designed to force private insurance out of business.

Hat Tip: Hot Air/Ed Morrissey for the video, originally at Verum Serum.

And, by the way, heres the jobs graph that puts the lie to the "saved or created" nonsense.  Or at least to any belief in the Obama team's predictions of future economic conditions.