Are the Medicare and Medicaid Offsets Real?
President Obama’s health care reserve fund proposal includes $622 billion in reductions in the growth of Medicare and Medicaid.[12] The President claims that all of the savings will come from cutting “waste and inefficiency” and thus will not reduce benefits at all.[13] Similarly, the Baucus bill would trim Medicaid and Medicare by $409 billion in its first decade and the House bill would trim it by $1 trillion over 20 years. Yet if hundreds of billions of dollars in waste can be trimmed from these programs without reducing benefits, why are lawmakers waiting for a health care expansion bill to enact these changes? Medicare and Medicaid are already growing unsustainably, and Congress and President Obama have an obligation to taxpayers to eliminate waste and inefficiency regardless of the fate of these particular health care bills. In reality, government waste is easy to identify, but difficult to eliminate. If lawmakers could easily cut nearly $1 trillion in waste from Medicare and Med
