Today brings yet another revelation about the faulty promises of the White House and Democrats in Congress about their unpopular health care law.

Earlier this week, the CBO director Doug Elmendorf announced that contrary to the claims by President Obama, the law won’t reduce government health care expenditures.  “In fact,” Elmendorf wrote, “CBO estimated that the health legislation will increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care . . .  by nearly $400 billion during the 2010-2019 period.”

Today, The New York Times reports, “In selling the health care overhaul to Congress, the Obama administration cited a once obscure research group at Dartmouth College to claim that it could not only cut billions in wasteful health care spending but make people healthier by doing so.” At a Senate Finance Committee hearing last year, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orzag said, “If you look at outcomes in quality, the higher-cost states, the higher-cost hospitals, the higher-cost doctors to not produce better outcomes than the more efficient providers. Researchers at Dartmouth College have taken this data, these data, and suggested that, if we can move the practice norms in the darker-colored parts of the country towards those in the lighter parts of the country [on the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care map], we could reduce health care costs by $700 billion a year without harming health outcomes. There’s nothing else that even comes close in terms of opportunities to improve the efficiency of our economy.”

“But while the research compiled in the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care has been widely interpreted as showing the country’s best and worst care,” the NYT writes, “the Dartmouth researchers themselves acknowledged in interviews that in fact it mainly shows the varying costs of care in the government’s Medicare program. Measures of the quality of care are not part of the formula.” The Times adds, “The mistaken belief that the Dartmouth research proves that cheaper care is better care is widespread — and has been fed in part by Dartmouth researchers themselves. The debate about the Dartmouth work is important because a growing number of health policy researchers are finding that overhauling the nation’s health care system will be far harder and more painful than the Dartmouth work has long suggested. Cuts, if not made carefully, could cost lives.”

Of course, as Karl Rove writes in The Wall Street Journal today, “[T]he real problem is ObamaCare’s substantive defects, some only now coming to light.” Rove proceeds to recount what’s been reported about the president’s health care bill over the last several weeks: Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard Foster, “estimated Americans would pay $120 billion in fines for not having adequate insurance coverage and that 14 million people would lose their coverage as rising costs led companies to dump it”; the CBO “found that the new health legislation would cost $115 billion more than estimated when it was enacted”; and “[a]ccording to a survey by Towers Watson, a human resources consulting firm, 88% of companies plan to pass on increased health-care benefit costs to employees, 74% plan to reduce benefits, and up to 12% will drop all coverage for employees.” And, Rove points out, “That’s not the end of the bad news. October will see the first round of Medicare cuts. Up to half of seniors will lose their Medicare Advantage coverage . . . or at least some of their benefits under this program.”

Given all of this, no one should be surprised that Americans remain unimpressed with the health care law. Rove writes, “White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod argued earlier this year that health-care reform would become more popular after it passed, boosting Democrats in the midterm elections. ‘We have to go out and sell it,’ he told the National Journal, adding in an interview in Newsweek that ‘people [will] see the benefits that accrue to them.’ That’s not quite how it has worked out. ObamaCare is becoming more, not less, unpopular.” Indeed, just yesterday, a CNN poll found 56% disapprove of the health care bill and a recent Rasmussen poll found 60% in favor of repealing it.

Republicans said all along the bill was not the kind of reform Americans wanted and it wouldn’t live up to the extravagant claims being made about it by Obama and Democrats in Congress. Over and over, Republicans have been proven right. The health care law needs to be repealed and replaced with real reform that actually addresses health care problems, without adding a new entitlement and ballooning government health care spending at a time when the national debt has exceeded $13 trillion.

Related:

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