For those who haven’t read the Obama Health Care Plan page (h/t continuum, abbyjean), I’d like to draw your attention to the following:

• Won’t add a dime to the deficit and is paid for upfront. The President’s plan will not add one dime to the deficit today or in the future and is paid for in a fiscally responsible way. It begins the process of reforming the health care system so that we can further curb health care cost growth over the long term, and invests in quality improvements, consumer protections, prevention, and premium assistance. The plan fully pays for this investment through health system savings and new revenue including a fee on insurance companies that sell very expensive plans.
• Requires additional cuts if savings are not realized. Under the plan, if the savings promised at the time of enactment don’t materialize, the President will be required to put forth additional savings to ensure that the plan does not add to the deficit.

This is not new rhetoric from the president. In the OMB statement I mocked (for the silliness of the precision in their forecasting, not for the following), there was similar language:

We are in the midst of the policy process surrounding the FY 2011 budget, and that process will include proposals to put the nation back on a fiscally sustainable path. In the meantime, we have to stop making these longer-term deficits worse – which is why the Administration supports statutory pay-as-you-go legislation, so that any new tax or entitlement initiatives are fully paid for. (If pay-go rules had been followed over the past eight years, the projected deficit would be $5 trillion lower over the next decade.)

In addition to avoiding making the problem any worse, we need to address the key driver of our long-term deficits: health care costs. The federal government simply cannot be put on a fiscally sustainable path without slowing the rate of health care cost growth in the long run. That is why the Administration is insistent that health care reform not only be deficit neutral over the next ten years, but also incorporate changes that will help reduce the deficit thereafter.

There’s no doubt that additional steps will be necessary to reduce our out-year deficits (including continuing our effort to reduce spending and reform government contracting), and the Administration will have more to say about all that as part of the FY 2011 Budget.

There are other examples, but you can look those up yourself. The point is that the president has preached fiscal discipline, even for programs he considers sacred. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really seem to have a lot of say in the matter. I doubt he’d veto the plan if it passed without the cost control mandates, though I’d be rather impressed if he did. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no faith in Congress. Congress doesn’t seem to understand what fiscal discipline actually is. They control the fate of legislation.