Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post is one of the best reporters on health care finance issues. This article in yesterday’s edition reviews the dubious financial projections behind the Bush Administration’s health care finance proposals:

If the Republican-controlled Congress enacted President Bush’s entire health care agenda, as many as 10 million people who lack health insurance would be covered at a cost of $102 billion over the next decade, according to his campaign aides.
But when the Bush-Cheney team was asked to provide documentation, the hard data fell far short of the claims, a gap supported by several independent analyses.
Projections by the Congressional Budget Office, the Treasury Department, academics and the campaign’s Web site suggest that under the best circumstances, Bush’s plans for health care would extend coverage to no more than 6 million people over the next decade and possibly as few as 2 million.
“There’s little reason to expect that there would be any reduction in the overall numbers of Americans without health insurance,” Brookings Institution health policy expert Henry J. Aaron said. “We’re swimming against a rather swift current in our efforts to reduce the number of uninsured, and the power of President Bush’s proposals to move against that current is, it seems to me, very, very limited.”

On the other hand, the article notes that the credibility of the Kerry campaign’s health care finance projections is not particularly compelling, either:

Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), has released a health care agenda that is more ambitious and more expensive, with plans to expand government health programs, offer tax credits similar to Bush’s and reimburse businesses for some of their most costly catastrophic cases.
Forecasting the cost and impact of policy proposals is always complicated, and both presidential campaigns try to spin the numbers to their advantage. Kerry, for example, estimates his health care proposals would cover 27 million people at a 10-year cost of $653 billion. But that assumes $300 billion in “savings” that the Bush team says might prove elusive. Without the savings, the cost of the Kerry package jumps to nearly $1 trillion.

Sigh.