Of course, it depends on what the meaning of “the Obama health plan” is.


If the Obama plan is understood not to include the $208 billion Medicare “doc fix” that the House removed from its bill to pass separately, and if the Obama plan would be sealed in an impenetrable vault within the National Archives, never again to be touched by God or man, then yes, the Congressional Budget Office predicts the Obama plan would reduce federal deficits by $138 billion over the next 10 years and by maybe one‐​half percent of GDP in the 10 years after that.


If, however, the doc fix is actually part of the Obama plan, and that law would be subject to normal political forces plus the new political dynamics the law would create, then the CBO predicts the Obama plan would increase federal deficits by $59 billion over the next 10 years and maybe one‐​quarter percent of GDP in the subsequent decade.


So really, the Obama plan’s impact on the deficit comes down to which one of those scenarios best describes the Obama plan, and which one is a partisan fantasy.