The Cost-Control Illusion - Breaking down the ObamaCare claims.

Excerpts from the above-titled WSJ Opinion column examine and repudiate ObamaCare claims:

• A new entitlement can "save" money. 
If this new entitlement actually "saves" money, it will be the first in history.

• Insurance premiums will fall.
Insurance subsidies are transfer payments in which government takes money out of the private economy and gives it to someone else. Subsidies thus put an even larger share of health-care spending in government hands. When you subsidize something, you get more of it, which means higher demand for insurance and health-care services. Combine this with new mandates that have raised costs in every state where they have been tried, and you will get higher premiums.

• The Cadillac tax. 
Not to worry, says Mr. Orszag, the tax would still create a "gradually increasing incentive to seek higher-quality and lower-cost health plans." In other words, some future Congress will impose the pain Democrats refuse to impose today.

• Pilot programs.
Mr. Orszag and Ms. DeParle also boast about the bill's micro-initiatives and Medicare demonstration projects. They write that "even if we thought we had the answer for containing costs and improving quality today, that would quickly change as health care evolved."… It sounds reasonable. Yet they're forced into this vague hope because their other ideas have either been killed by Congress or because CBO says they won't save money.

• The Medicare commission.
This is the real secret of Mr. Orszag's cost-control confidence, and Harvard economist David Cutler wrote in our pages this week that this "independent board" of sages will have the power to recommend spending cuts and create "a process for fast-tracking such recommendations through Congress." We'll believe that when we see it, given how Congress has long overruled specific Medicare spending cuts.
  But let's say Congress does cede power to this unelected group of wise men. The commission will then function much like similar bodies do in Europe—controlling costs by denying coverage for new technologies or patients at the end of life, or by limiting spending on certain treatments and thus creating longer waits. Governor Deval Patrick has already announced the early stages of such a price-control regime in Massachusetts.

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ObamaCare's real cost-control plan boils down to this: First subsidize coverage so much that costs explode, raise taxes as much as possible to pay for it, and when that isn't enough hand power to an unelected committee to limit treatment and control prices by government order. This is what Democrats are voting for.

Please read the entire column here…