Math doesn’t add up for reform foes

Tom Harper, Henderson

Saturday, May 22, 2010 | 2:04 a.m.

In Joseph Schillmoeller’s Monday letter to the editor, headlined “Regarding big spending, just say no,” he identifies the many voters of the “Party of Yes” (of which I’m a proud cardholder) who supported the health care reform legislation as people who are “either on the dole or refuse to get (their) head out of the sand.” In making this argument, Schillmoeller, as well as other members of the “Party of No,” cites the Congressional Budget Office estimate they say shows that the actual claimed cost of the legislation was off by $115 billion.

While Republican Minority Leader John Boehner and others want to use “fuzzy math” and be disingenuous in claiming the health care law will cost an extra $115 billion, they are simply wrong. The majority of the money in the CBO’s estimate — $86 billion to be exact — is money that had been appropriated before passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. We’d be spending that money with or without the law.

Therefore, while there will be about $30 million less in savings from the projected savings of $143 billion, that still results in $113 billion in savings.

I’ll take $113 billion in savings any day instead of unsustainable health care costs that were going to bankrupt this nation. I’ll also side with brave and courageous public servants of the “Party of Yes,” like President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Congresswomen Shelley Berkley and Dina Titus, who had the political will and courage to effect this most necessary legislation in a world so resistant to change.