Obamacare lacks cost containment

And that's one of the biggest issues I have with this legislation. I think the government's subsidies for lower-income families to buy private health insurance will more than offset any Medicare savings.

And, why is this lacking? Lack of Congressional will and lack of presidential push. Here's more:

It was a bold response to skyrocketing health insurance premiums. President Barack Obama would give federal authorities the power to block unreasonable rate hikes.

Yet when Democrats unveiled the final, incarnation of their health care bill this week, the proposal was nowhere to be found. ...

In the cases of the insurance rate authority, the Republican ideas and the special deals, it came down to Obama making promises that Congress didn't keep. He can propose whatever he wants, but it's up to Congress to enshrine it into law.

Arguably, the president could have foreseen that outcome, and was making a low-risk p.r. move by floating proposals — dismissed by critics as insubstantial anyway — whose demise he couldn't be blamed for.

While the White House worked hard to trumpet Obama's plans for the rate authority, his embrace of bipartisanship and his opposition to special deals, the administration hardly advertised the lack of follow-through. Understandable, certainly, but perhaps not the new way of doing business that Obama promised to bring to Washington.

That's why I have decried: the lack of a federal insurance regulation agency; the lack of cost controls on medications, whether through allowing reimportation from Canada or other means; the backdoor deals with Big Pharma; and more.

That said, if Obama would actually create a new federal agency, maybe it could be included under reconciliation. But he hasn't. Nor has he promised, yet, to address that in the future.

That's why I don't count the CBO's chickens in this area. The eggs are nowhere near hatched.