WASHINGTON — Critics of the new health-care law are ridiculing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for essentially admitting a key GOP contention: that the administration has been “double counting” Medicare savings by saying the same $500 billion would be used both for extending the life of the current program and for funding its new mandates.

“Not that it’s any comfort to the American people, but the administration seems to finally be acknowledging a basic fact: Over a half-trillion dollars can’t be simultaneously used to both fund Medicare — a program on the verge of insolvency — and another unsustainable entitlement that is ObamaCare,” fumed Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) yesterday.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) said, “The more we dig into the new health-care law, the more we see how devious the Obama administration was in deceiving Congress and the public about the expense of it.”

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) angrily confronted Sebelius on the accounting gimmick during congressional testimony Thursday.

“There is an issue here on the budget because your own actuary has said you can’t double count,” he said. “You can’t count . . . ”

“What’s the $500 billion in cuts for? . . . Are you using it to save Medicare or are you using it for health reform?”

She responded, “Both.”

An HHS spokesman told the Web site Daily Caller that the way the health-law costs are estimated is “entirely consistent” with the way the cost of legislation has been estimated for 30 years.

When the bill was moving through Congress in 2008 and 2009, then-Sen. Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, compared it to “Bernie Madoff accounting.”

Meanwhile, the number of organizations given HHS waivers exempting them from some of the more expensive provisions of the law reached 1,000, according to the latest department statistics.

Republicans have slammed the waivers as an admission of problems with the law, and claim an inordinate number have gone to the Democrats’ union allies, including the United Federation of Teachers and SEIU 1199, the health-care workers union.

smiller@nypost.com

