Evidence has surfaced of the process by which Democrats hide the cost of health care reform from the public. Michael F. Cannon of the Cato Institute has done the detective work. A CBO memorandum issued last weekend reveals overt gaming of the Congressional Budget Office's criteria for accounting what constitutes a cost or revenue to the government. Cannon explains:... keeping the cost of their private-sector mandates out of the federal budget has been Job One for Democratic health wonks.  While head of the CBO, Obama's budget director Peter Orszag altered the CBO's orientation to make it more open and collaborative.  One of the things about which the CBO has been more open is the criteria it uses to determine whether to include mandated private-sector spending in the federal budget.  The CBO even published a paper on the topic.  Read this profile of Orszag by Ezra Klein, and you'll see that those criteria were also a likely area of collaboration with lawmakers....(Read Full Post)