Michael F. Cannon, the director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute and coauthor of Healthy Competition:  What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It, has written an article that appeared in various places, incuding The National Review Online, titled "The $1.5 Trillion Fraud."  It relates to the current Democrat strategy for "hiding the true cost of their legislation."  The link for the article is as follows, and I recommend it for anyone who wants a peek inside some of the intricacies of the Democrats' attempts to pass their health-care overhaul this weekend. 

http://article.nationalrevi...=

While it's highly recommended to read the entire article, here are some of the salient paragraphs: 

"If House Democrats hold a vote on their health-care overhaul this weekend, they might as well vote on abolishing the Congressional Budget Office too.  It would be no more audacious -- and much more honest -- than their current strategy for hiding the true cost of their legislation. 

"Never mind the everyday budget gimmicks House Democrats have used, such as removing $250 billion of deficit spending to be voted on separately.  Or claiming their bill would cost just $894 billion -- around $400 billion less than the CBO actually projected.  We've seen this kind of trickery plenty in recent years; to suppress an inconvenient cost estimate of its proposed Medicare drug entitlement, the Bush administration threatened to fire Medicare's chief actuary. 

"Deceptions on this scale are child's play, at least when compared to what has to be the biggest fiscal obfuscation in the history of American politics:  The current leadership has rigged the legislation so that 60 percent of its total cost will not be made public by the CBO in advance of the House vote.  Here's how they did it."

.....

"So while the CBO estimates that the coverage expansions in the House Democrats' legislation would trigger about $1 trillion of new federal spending over ten years, the actual cost of those coverage expansions is more like $2.5 trillion. 

"The CBO exists to bring honest accounting to the federal government.  House Democrats are gaming the CBO, subverting this purpose.  Anyone who cares about honest accounting or transparency in government should put the brakes on this vote until the American people have all the facts. 

As soon as this blog is published, I'm going to send the same text to my Representative, along with some words of advice for him.