Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee and a member of the so-called bipartisan ‘Gang of Six’ negotiations — joined the growing chorus of Republican lawmakers who are using the adjusted deficit numbers to argue for a smaller health reform package:

Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, one of three Senate Republicans negotiating on health care, said the soaring federal budget deficit “puts a stake in the heart” of $1 trillion measures being debated in Congress….“It’s going to have a big impact on whether I’ll even support something,” he said at a town-hall meeting yesterday in Le Mars, Iowa….Still, he said, a forecast by the Congressional Budget Office that deficits between 2010 and 2019 will total $7.1 trillion calls for a more-limited measure than the $900 billion bill the bipartisan group was discussing last month. “We’re going to be looking at smaller numbers,” he said. The deficit projection also dooms $1 trillion measures already moving through the House and approved by the Senate health committee, Grassley said.

Grassley’s suggestion that health care reform would grow the deficit demonstrates that the Senator is either misinformed or deliberately manufacturing reasons to oppose health care reform. The budget framework requires a deficit-neutral health care reform bill, and the Democrats have pledged to fully finance coverage expansion from savings within the system and new sources of revenue.

Secondly, health care is the economy; health care is the deficit. Health care costs are the long-term driving force in federal and state budgets and represent the single most important factor “influencing the Federal Government’s long-term fiscal balance.” The Democrats’ health care reform will help re-orient the system from spending 80% of its dollars treating chronic illnesses into a system prevents the chronic conditions from developing in the first place. It will begin to change the way providers are paid so that we are rewarding quality care and not just quantity care.

In other words, in order to transform America’s expensive patchwork health care system into a system that covers everyone and reduces health care spending by successfully preventing and managing chronic conditions, Congress will have to invest a significant amount into reform. If done right, that investment can place the system and the nation on a firm fiscal footing and save millions of middle class families from catastrophic increases in health care costs. As Tim Fernholz points out, “health-care reform will lead to increases in GDP, reaching over 2 percent in 2020 that would lead to proportional increases in tax revenue and lower deficits. But most important, eliminating the “crazy system of cross-subsidies,” as Center for Budget and Policy Priorities economist Jim Horney calls the complex interweaving of publicly and privately subsidized care for the under- and uninsured, would create a much simpler framework for future cost-reduction efforts.”

The Wonk Room has compiled a list of Grassley’s most egregious misrepresentations and will continue monitoring and fact checking Grassley’s statements throughout the reform process. Read the full document HERE.

This morning, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) honored Ted Kennedy’s legacy by disingenuously arguing that Kennedy’s absence from the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) mark-up hearings allowed Democrats to reject Republican amendments “of any significance”:

You’d have to change the way things have been done and that is the fact that there have been no real negotiations. There has been a bill before committee, on which I sit, the HELP committee and it was done by Democrats and no amendments were agreed to of any significance and so that’s not the kind of negotiations I did with Senator Kennedy.

Watch it:

While McCain and the other Republicans on the HELP committee tried to delay the mark-up process by offering numerous nuance amendments and complaining that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had not yet scored the entire proposal, the committee accepted 160 Republican amendments and spent 13 days and more than 60 hours debating the legislation. McCain objected to mark-up from the very beginning, arguing that the committee should “scrap the current bill and start over and start over in a true bipartisan fashion.”

As Slate’s Christopher Beam pointed out, “many of the GOP amendments on this incomplete list do seem pretty substantive.” (The committee even accepted several of McCain’s more substantive amendments):

- McCain 205: To establish certain policies for small group health plans

- McCain 2: Determines whether existing Federal Government sponsored health and wellness initiatives are effective in achieving their stated goals.

- Enzi 25: To impose an earning requirement with respect to enrollees.

- Hatch: Adds programs based on pain care, environment, antimicrobial resistance, oral health, wellness programs for at risk populations.

Since Kennedy’s death, a long line of Republicans have argued that “Kennedy’s absence from the health care debate prevented lawmakers from reaching a bipartisan compromise and that had Kennedy been present, agreement on health care reform would have been more likely.” But as Ezra Klein argues, “this stuff just isn’t plausible. Kennedy was around in 1994 and there was no deal. More to the point, Kennedy’s committee, the HELP Committee, has passed health-care reform. Kennedy’s staff, as you might expect, led their effort. But neither Kennedy nor his staff can make the deals for another committee. If Kennedy were in the Senate now, health care would be exactly where it is: Through Ted Kennedy’s Committee and stuck in the morass of Max Baucus’s Gang of Six. ”

Indeed, the GOP has refused to negotiate in good faith, consistantly misrepresenting the consequences of reform and fearmongering about the public health insurance option. Some Republicans are also manipulating the events of the August recess to argue that that Americans are more concerned about jobs than health care reform and are urging Congress to abandon the present effort and adopt “incremental” changes.