Unhealthy Numbers

The departure of White House budget director Peter Orszag should be celebrated by those who believe a federal government that demands an end to slippery and unethical accounting practices on Wall Street should heed its own counsel.

That Orszag is leaving as the poster child for government number-fudging is all the more surprising given his history. As head of the Congressional Budget Office, Orszag helped document the dubious practices of the George W. Bush administration and Congress in disguising the true size of budget deficits by arbitrarily exempting "emergency" spending, such as for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

After being named budget director by President Barack Obama, Orszag gave an interview to The New York Times in which he assailed the use of "magic asterisks" to disguise bad news on spending and made this assertion: ''The president prefers to tell the truth rather than make the numbers look better by pretending.''

But when it came to helping Obama win approval of the No. 1 item on his domestic agenda — an ambitious overhaul of the nation's health care system — Orszag did just that, using a trick that takes advantage of the CBO's biggest weakness. That weakness: When "scoring" the cost of big initiatives, the CBO is required to accept assumptions about future congressional acts built into pending legislation.

This allowed the Obama administration to assert its plan to sharply expand federal involvement in health care would save money because of future cuts in government health spending.

But soon after the health overhaul was enacted in March, the chief actuary for the administration's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Richard S. Foster, issued a report forecasting at least $311 billion in red ink relating to the health law over its first decade. Another former CBO director, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, estimates the overhaul will increase the deficit by more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade and by $1.5 trillion in its second decade.

Now there are many politicians and millions of Americans who supported the health law while never believing claims it would save money. They think it is long overdue for the U.S. to have a more inclusive health care system, calling this the mark of a humane nation. But many Americans worried about the cost of the plan before Congress. The White House tried to assuage their concerns with disinformation about imaginary long-term savings.

This isn't right. However one feels about any high-profile government initiative, the debates over those issues need to be grounded in honesty. The same questions about whether the public was deceived before the Iraq war was launched in 2003 could be raised about the fiscal claims made for the health overhaul in the months leading up to its adoption.

Perhaps exaggeration and deception are bipartisan staples of U.S. political salesmanship. But such tactics still need to be exposed and deplored — not tolerated. Peter Orszag will not be missed.

REPRINTED FROM THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE.

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