Trimming the deficit via health care reform?

The latest health care proposal is touted as saving the government money:

A health-care reform bill drafted by the Senate Finance Committee would expand health coverage to nearly 30 million Americans who currently lack insurance and would meet President Obama’s goal of reducing the federal budget deficit by 2019, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

The bill would cost $829 billion over the next decade, but would more than offset that cost by slicing hundreds of billions from government health programs such as Medicare and by imposing a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost insurance policies starting in 2013.

All told, the package would slice $81 billion from projected budget deficits over the next 10 years, the CBO said, and continue to reduce deficits well into the future.

It would also expand coverage to 94 percent of Americans by 2019, the CBO said, up from the current 83 percent.

I’m curious what they are cutting out of Medicare. If it’s just paying less for services, that will mean even fewer doctors will take Medicare patients than do now. And this is an even bigger tax on the “cadillac plans” that many Americans enjoy and soon won’t have than was announced earlier. And for all of this, the percentage of Americans now having health care insurance will go up only 11%? Still, Congress seems giddy to have come up with a plan that will actually cut the deficit, so this might be what we end up with, though details of the legislation have yet to be spelled out.