Could you make your family budget look good in a ten-year analysis if you counted ten years of income but only seven of expenditures? That’s what the Congressional Budget Office did in their report on Senator Max Baucus’s health care bill.

Their subpar accounting includes revenue from tax increases and cuts to Medicare and Medicare Advantage starting in 2010. However, the bulk of expenditures begin in 2013, when many of the bill’s programs go into effect. It sounds like the CBO has started taking accounting tips from old Enron manuals. How can Democrats be taken seriously if they use ten years of revenue to pay for seven years of expenditures?

It’s frightening that Congress could soon vote on a bill that will cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars without the crucial information of an honest CBO score. But that’s just what Democrats will ask us all to do. It is smoke-and-mirrors trickery that should have no place in Congress – a deceitful playbook from which the Congressional Majority has played from time and time again.

Democrats will use these CBO numbers to continue the charade that their proposals would reduce health care costs for Americans. But one only has to look at the dozens of new taxes Senator Baucus’s bill creates to see that health care will become much more expensive for Americans. And for the first three years, we really won’t be getting what we’re paying for.