Leadership Quote by David Obey

Obey’s line is the rare budget-world admission that actually tells the truth: “cutting” is a slogan; governing is arithmetic. The careful throat-clearing up front (“We need to be careful”) is doing political triage. It signals that the real fight isn’t over ideology in the abstract, but over how voters hear numbers. People like the idea of lower costs, but they experience health care as a bill that keeps climbing. Obey reframes the promise from an impossible fantasy (absolute reductions) to a technocrat’s reality (bending the curve), without saying “taxes” or “rationing” or any of the other words that make ads.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of American health policy’s default setting: perpetual growth. By conceding that costs “are not going to be reduced,” he’s acknowledging structural drivers - an aging population, expensive technology, fee-for-service incentives, consolidated hospital systems - that don’t vanish because Congress changes a line item. He’s also telegraphing the only politically survivable version of cost control: savings measured against projections. That’s how Washington “finds” money without visibly taking it away.

Context matters. Coming from a longtime Democratic appropriator steeped in federal budgeting, it reads less like evasiveness than a defensive maneuver against bad-faith debates. Opponents can’t easily accuse you of slashing care if you’re talking about the rate of increase; allies can still claim fiscal responsibility. It’s a quote built to survive the soundbite economy, even as it exposes it.