Too late to do any good, media starts to cover the health care lies...

One of the points that the President and the Democratic Congressional leadership repeatedly used as a selling point was that this bill would not only not expand the budget deficit, it would shrink it. This was obviously a lie, as they put in many fantastic provisions designed specifically to get good CBO scores, provisions that a blind man could see wouldn't be accurate.

Now that it's safely passed and signed, of course, the mainstream press can begin to cover it. So things are going to trickle out like this AP story:

In the first two days after the law was signed, three major companies — Deere & Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Valero Energy — said they expect to take a total hit of $265 million to account for smaller tax deductions in the future.

With more than 3,500 companies now getting the tax break as an incentive to keep providing coverage, others are almost certain to announce similar cost increases in the weeks ahead as they sort out the impact of the change.

Figuring out what it will mean for retirees will take longer, but analysts said as many as 2 million could lose the prescription drug coverage provided by their former employers, leaving them to enroll in Medicare's program.

Well, duh. Change the laws and behavior changes. The CBO score was based, in part, on the nonsensical assumption that they could remove this corporate tax benefit and it would result in a net benefit to the Federal treasury. More tax revenue, no cost, what could possibly go wrong? Well, corporations, not being morons, respond to this government behavior by cutting the programs which have now become significantly more expensive, leaving those people to go directly into Medicare. So instead of being a net cash flow positive, closing the budget deficit, it's going to end up a net cash flow negative, increasing the budget deficit.

This didn't take a lot of foresight to see. But the bill wasn't ever designed to help the budget deficit problems, no matter how vociferously the President has lied said that that was the case. It was designed to allow them to lie pretend claim that it was designed to help the budget deficit problems.

Fasten your seat-belts, folks, because this is just getting started, and it's going to be a bumpy ride...