Now he tells us: Medicare’s chief actuary says rosy ObamaCare projections are complete nonsense

The Obama administration just got caught trying to slip another one past the American people. They used data in the annual Medicare Trustees Report to prove that that ObamaCare would inject new life in the Medicare monster.

Unfortunately for the President, that argument didn’t hold up when economics21.org analyzed the report and learned that Medicare’s own chief actuary disagrees. Strongly disagrees, in fact. He says they underestimated future costs by 68%.

To repeat, the administration underestimated costs by a remarkable 68%:

“(T)he financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range. . . or the long range. . . . I encourage readers to review the ‘illustrative alternative’ projections that are based on more sustainable assumptions for physician and other Medicare price updates.”

These remarkable words are found, in all places, in the “Statement of Actuarial Opinion” in the back of the 2010 annual Medicare Trustees’ Report.

It is difficult to overstate how unusual this development is. The normal process with the annual Trustees’ Reports is for the Trustees to develop and publish the best available projections for the future finances of Social Security and Medicare. The respective Social Security and Medicare actuaries then sign a pro forma blessing of those projections, which is tacked to the back of the report when released to the public.

This year, the Medicare Chief Actuary clearly did not feel he could in good conscience sign such a declaration.

Our initial inclination was to criticize the Obama administration on this error. But on second thought, we say it deserves a little credit here. After all, they’re only off by 68% and that’s a lot closer than they’ve come on any of their other economic projections.

H/T: HotAir.com