It’s worth actually reading the House Republican attack on the CBO’s health reform estimates, just to get a sense of the utter, deliberate fraudulence of the whole thing. Here’s the key picture:

So, let’s look at the pieces of the adjustments that allegedly turn a deficit-reducing policy into a deficit-increasing policy.

1. The doc fix: this is childish stuff, blaming the health reform for costs that will happen whether or not the reform happens.

2. Alleged “double-counting” of Medicare savings; actually, there’s no double-counting involved. Savings are savings. It’s true that some people have spoken loosely as if the gains to the Medicare trust fund and the reduction in the deficit are separate and additive, but the CBO never has, and all of that is irrelevant to the 10-year estimate.

3. “Appropriations” — that’s administrative costs, of which the great bulk would be incurred even without the bill.

4. Social Security taxes — I think they mean Medicare, but anyway, additional tax revenue does reduce the deficit, regardless of what trust fund it’s allocated to.

5. CLASS Act: this will reduce the deficit over the next 10 years, but will have some long-run costs. But if you’re going to talk long run, you should do it everywhere – and health reform gets better, not worse, over time. In fact, the main reason repeal costs more than the original estimate of savings is that moving the window forward a year makes the benefits of reform bigger.

So, of the five claimed “gimmicks”, three are nothing of the kind — GOP claims are fraud, pure and simple. Of the other two, one (appropriations) is mostly fraud, the other involves tricky play with time horizons.

And all of it is dressed up with out-of-context quotes from various people.

I know I should be accustomed to this sort of thing by now, but it’s still something to behold.