at the reality of real numbers. back when they first started medicare, they projected out 25 years and said it would cost $12 million in 1990. it cost $110 billion. and you re talking about these studies conducted within medicare. cbo just conducted a study of 34 programs to cut costs i understand this argument, but it didn t cut any costs whatsoever. this isn t going to help you on the campaign trail. specifically, how did cbo game the numbers for the president s health care plan? just projecting these phantom savings in medicare. let s face it. we have not implemented the $208 billion worth of sgr cuts yet, ok? why does anybody think that congress is going to actually implement the $529 billion worth of the first 10-year cuts, much less the $1.6 trillion that would be required to be cutting medicare in the time frame of 2016, 2025, when the real bill really comes due? where are we going to get $1.6 trillion worth of cuts? steve rattner, i want to put
under the obama plan 529 billion. under owe ryen added debt is 321 trillion. under obama 6.4 trillion. they balance the budget by 2040. obama plan balances the budget never. say what you will but at least the ryan budget does address our national debt. first of all we haven t seen all of the details. the ryan plan mitt romney the frontrunner this is really the romney riot. it will be rubber stamped if mitt romney is president. there are millionaires and billionaires paid for by veterans. you don t know that. yes. you don t know what they are going to take away in tax deductions. they will be big tax.
years. that sounds great. but in october of this past year, the president and his health care secretary did away with the class act which wiped out about $70 billion worth of the projected $143 billion savin savings. you say they knew going in the class act wasn t going to work and that was a gimmick to sell it. the budget chairman called the class act a scheme. they included $1100 million in exchanges that chips away at the deficit reduction. the real doozy in terms of that sleight of hand is the fact that they actually said they were going to reduce medicare by $529 billion. they haven t reduced medicare or payments from providers by $208 billion under the sgr, what makes anybody think they re going to do that with the $529 billion. this thing is going to add hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars to our debt and deficit and we can t afford it. real quickly, you would know something about that. you were in a small business and you owned one for 31 years.
they take $590 billion out of the medicare program and one thing i have pointed out, if you notice, we have not imposed the $208 billion of supposed medicare cuts to providers that is required under the sustainable growth rate formula and we have not enacted that because congress understands if they do that, access to care is beginning to be hampered. quality of care will go down. and, i am skeptical those $529 billion of cuts would occur in medicare but if they did, understand what that would do to the quality of care to the access of care. because medicaid frequently doesn t even cover the cost to providers, in some states, some districts, less than 60 percent of providers actually accept medicaid patients. what will happen if the cuts go through? you will reduce the number of doctors that will see medicare parents and, by the way, 25
brian: department of energy is standing by their decision to give $529 billion to fisker automotive to produce electric cars. steve: our next guest says their new car, the karma, could be the worst electric car ever made. warren meyer is a business owner and writer at forbes.com and joins us live. good morning to you. good morning. steve: okay. so we saw that the epa put out a figure that the fisker cars are averaging 52 millions per gallon. but you say that is way off. yeah. obviously miles per gallon is kind of a funny stat for electric cars because they don t have gas and tanks. they have electricity and batteries. but if you go all the way back to the power plant, something has to make that electricity and that s usually a fossil fuel like oil or coal or gas. and so the epa nominally came up with a process that sort of says how much fuel that the power plant does it take to create the electricity that charges the car? it turns out that that the