Barack Obama has much of the country convinced right now that the only way we are going to turn our economy around is if we get the price of healthcare under control. Right? Was that not his message the other night during his presser? This all comes under the "never let a good crisis go to waste" dogma. Government spending is in crisis; so, whether it's valid or not, just tell the dumb masses that all we need to do in order to get government spending under control is to nationalize health care.

The Congressional Budget Office says that the proposal to give an independent panel the power to keep Medicare spending in check would actually save almost no money over 10 years. Let's compare. The total cost of this healthcare package is $1 trillion. That's according to the White House, but of course you know that is just the beginning. No government program since WWII has cost what original estimates predict. So the price tag is $1 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office says that this Medicare panel will save a whopping $2 billion over the next 10 years. Folks, that is a 0.2% savings.

But that's okay. Just continue thinking that the Democrats are doing this in order to cut your costs and provide you better care. The truth is that they are doing it in order to make you more dependent on government and to gain more power over you.

So how does the White House react to this news? The White House Budget Director Peter Orszag gets on one of the Sunday talk shows and says that this analysis "could feed the perception of the office's bias toward 'exaggerating costs and underestimating savings.'" Oh, so now the CBO suddenly has a bias. Then he goes on to say that, "The point of the proposal ... was never to generate savings over the next decade ... Instead the goal is to provide a mechanism for improving quality of care for beneficiaries and reducing costs over the long term." Are you buying this, folks?