Health Overhaul: Democrats are touting the Congressional Budget Office's $829 billion cost estimate as a clincher for a government takeover of our medical system. They should read all 13 pages of the CBO critique.

'Lies" or "damned lies" may well be the accusation the White House hurled at the CBO when its director was called onto the Oval Office carpet earlier in the year. But the rest of us can only accuse Congress' budget office of the third offense that Mark Twain famously bemoaned — "statistics."

The CBO says the "gross cost of coverage provisions" in the Senate's health reform package would come to $829 billion over a decade — low enough for the White House and Democrats in Congress to cheer like they're giving taxpayers some great deal from the bargain basement.

But read on. On page 12 of CBO director Douglas Elmendorf's letter to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mt., comes the passage that reveals the skepticism of Congress' non-partisan in-house numbers crunchers.

"These projections assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades," writes Elmendorf, "which is often not the case for major legislation."

"Often" not the case? Try "never."

Moreover, government cost estimates always end up being understated. (It's easy to be an optimist when it's other people's money you're spending.)

As former Republican Sen. Rudy Boschwitz and former Democratic Rep. Tim Penny, both of Minnesota, wrote in IBD in July, "When Medicare was being considered in the mid-1960s, the government projected that the outlays for the program 25 years down the road would be $10 billion. Instead, in 1990, 25 years later, the outlays were $107 billion. Government estimates were off by a factor of more than 10!"

Anyone who believes there won't be similar "surprise" cost overruns this time around is wearing the rosiest of rose-colored glasses.

Add to this the fact that what the CBO was running a cost estimate on wasn't even a real piece of legislation, but rather "conceptual language," as Senate Finance Committee ranking Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa told the National Review.

Grassley warned of a "huge, untold story of this CBO report" — that health insurance premiums will rise for 85% of those with coverage, thanks to the plan's taxation of insurance policies.

If all you've been listening to is the Democrats' scare rhetoric, you probably thought your premiums would stabilize, or even go down. Think again.

Then there's the proposed individual mandate, which means those who fail to get health coverage get hit with still another tax — to the tune of an estimated $1 billion a year.

All this meddling and money grabbing, and yet in 2019 we will still be leaving an estimated 25 million people uninsured — which, of course, means future calls for even more government meddling down the road to fix a problem Congress and the White House claim they're urgently solving now.

America has the greatest health care system in the world, envied by those elsewhere who wait many months for bypass surgeries and hip replacements. Its shortcomings can and should be fixed with increased control and choice for patients, the reining in of ambulance-chaser trial lawyers, and letting insurers compete across state lines.

Our system's weaknesses will only worsen with this proposed government takeover.