When key House chairman and moderate House Democrats on Tuesday agreed to a White House-backed proposal that would give an outside panel the power to make cuts to government-financed health care programs, Politico reports, White House budget director Peter Orszag declared the plan “probably the most important piece that can be added” to Obama’s health care reform plans.

Sadly for Orszag, Congressional Democrats and the American people in general, the Congressional Budget Office now says that the cuts would save the U.S… virtually nothing.

But on Saturday, theCongressional Budget Officesaid the proposal to give an independent panel the power to keep Medicare spending in check would only save about $2 billion over 10 years…

That is $2 billion on a total of one trillion. Nothing indeed. The CBO explained:

“In CBO’s judgment, the probability is high that no savings would be realized … but there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized. Looking beyond the 10-year budget window, CBO expects that this proposal would generate larger but still modest savings on the same probabilistic basis,” CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf wrote in a letterto House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Saturday.

The above means in normal English that the CBO expects the cuts not to save the federal government any money – it could be wrong in so far that some is saved, but chances are it will make (little to) no difference.

Orszag, more interested in playing politics than acting in the American people’s interest, immediately downplayed the report saying the cuts were not meant ”to generate savings over the next decade. … Instead, the goal is to provide a mechanism for improving quality of care for beneficiaries and reducing costs over the long term.”

“In other words,” he added, “in the terminology of our belt-and-suspenders approach to a fiscally responsible health reform, the IMAC is a game changer not a scoreable offset.”

Nonsense, of course. The White House is playing games. They’re not truly trying to save money. If that was the goal, Orszag would’ve reacted to the report by saying they’d give the plan another look. Instead, he buries his head in the sand and pretends all is well.

Let’s hope moderate Democrats (Blue Dogs) will refuse to be played for suckers. They’d better, also for their own sake; if they vote for this plan and the American people find out the White House played games with them and Congress fell for it, they’ll immediately proceed to kick their Congressmen out of their beautiful offices in Washington, D.C.