Investors Business Daily has an excellent debunking of the Congressional Budget Office figures. Well, the CBO isn’t technically lying. The non-partisan agency is being charged with scoring sneaky accounting maneuvers and screwy time lines. So the debunking deals more with left-wing representations of the projection than the projection itself.

I’ll provide an overview of the five reasons, but you really need to read the IBD article itself. Arm yourself with the facts about this government-run health care legislation. They aren’t pretty but they’re important to understand.

1. Cuts to Medicare – Hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare and Medicare Advantage are being accounted for in the projection. Such cuts would jeopardize access to care for millions of American seniors. But Congress tends not to implement such cuts, though they’re part of the projection.
2. The Timeline – Funny story. You see, the legislation’s benefits don’t go into effect until 2014. But you know what starts immediately? The tax increases! So we get to pay taxes for benefits for four years, a presidential term, before any benefits actually kick-in. Therefore, the CBO score only includes the cost for six of the next ten years.
3. No Doctor Fix – The projection excludes the so-called “doc fix”, which suspends cuts of payments to doctors. This “fix” isn’t considered in the CBO projection. Total cost of the “doc fix”? $247 billion over the next decade.
4. Student Loans – The legislation includes nationalization of the student loan industry, which accounts for $19 billion in deficit reduction.
5. CLASS – I need to just quote IBD on this: “In the Senate health bill, a new, voluntary long-term care insurance program called CLASS accounted for some $72 billion of the deficit reduction.  The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program is supposed to be deficit-neutral long-term. But Democrats are counting the upfront premium surplus in the short term and ignoring the significant operating deficits after 2029.”

Everything is not as it seems. Democrats have used sneaky accounting practices and outright lies, and they still can’t get the cost of government-run health care under $940 billion.