The smoke and mirrors are at work in Washington like never before.

First, there's the Congressional Budget Office's latest cost analysis of the Senate Finance Committee's health care proposal created by Sen. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat, the new fountain of health care knowledge in a Congress controlled by Democrats bound and determined to pass this bad legislation opposed by most Americans.

The CBO guessed the cost for the plan at $829 billion over 10 years and said the plan would reduce the federal deficit by $81 billion in the same time frame by cutting Medicare spending and raising taxes.

Senior citizens should know that the hocus-Baucus bill, like two House bills, slashes future funding for Medicare by at least $279 billion - cutting $117 billion from private Medicare Advantage plans and "cutting the growth of Medicare payments to other health providers by $162 billion," according to the New York Times.

How will those billions be cut from Medicare?

The hocus-Baucus bill will penalize doctors in the 90th percentile and higher for "the cost of what they use to treat their patients compared with national averages," according to Betsy McCaughey, chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and former New York lieutenant governor writing in the New York Post.

"It will punish doctors for treating high cost patients with complex conditions," she says. "Inevitably, it will lower the quality of care."

A provision of the hocus-Baucus bill, Ms. McCaughey says, "gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services the power to define quality, cost-effective care for each medical condition and penalize doctors who spend more on their patients."

That's a sure-fire way to cut Medicare costs: a Washington bureaucrat calling the shots for your doctor.

And all those cuts will be coming at the time when baby boomers will be adding 30 percent more people to Medicare. Smoke and mirrors.

Second, the CBO said that even under the Utopian hocus-Baucus bill, an astounding 25 million people, about one-third of them immigrants, would still be uninsured 10 years from now. I thought everybody was going to be covered by Obamacare.

The bill calls for $461 billion in subsidies over 10 years for low- and middle-income people to buy insurance and proposes to raise $201 billion by slapping a new tax on "high-cost insurance policies."

Here's the kicker: the hocus-Baucus bill would set up a Medicare commission empowered to make cuts in Medicare - and the clairvoyant CBO looks into its crystal ball and says the commission would save $22 billion over 10 years. How?

The bill also calls for penalties - taxes - for individuals who don't buy insurance and employers who don't provide it, to the tune of a CBO guesstimated $27 billion in new tax revenues to feed the health care monster.

Never mind that most American voters oppose those provisions and do not want the hocus-Baucus bill. That's irrelevant.

The Democrats are determined to give you this health care plan even if it kills you.

dmckee9613@aol.com