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MAJORITY Leader Harry Reid unveiled Senate Democrats' health care fig leaf Wednesday, and what a fig leaf it is ' totaling $848 billion.
We call Reid's merging of competing Senate health care bills a fig leaf for what it hides ' more than $2 trillion in actual program spending ' funded with tax increases and Medicare cuts, which legislates insurance mandates and an expanded government role in Americans' health care.

There are detail differences between the Senate's version and a bill passed earlier this month by the House. But the big picture is much the same: a Washington, big-government approach to reform that will cost more than advertised while doing little to control rising costs.

A number of Democrats thought to be shaky on health care cheered Reid's handiwork, but this legislation, like its House cousin, is more sleight-of-hand, masking its true cost and negative effects on the U.S. economy and the health care system.

Start with the price tag. Reid got a favorable cost analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, less than $1 trillion over 10 years, but only by delaying spending under the program to 2014, four years after it starts collecting taxes. The actual 10-year cost of the program, when taxes and spending are fully implemented, is more than $2 trillion, critics say.

As for savings, don't get carried away by the $130 billion in deficit reduction trumpeted by Reid. Senate Republicans said the amount is less than the federal deficit for the month of October alone.

The program will be funded by taxing "Cadillac' insurance plans, taxing drugs and medical devices and unlikely assumptions ' such as the claim reimbursements to Medicare doctors will be cut 23 percent by 2011 and not be restored.

The idea, writes Yuval Levin for National Review Online, is to spend trillions as the federal debt mounts, tax an already troubled economy, impose insurance mandates on employers with unemployment topping 10 percent and squeeze money out of Medicare while setting up a new entitlement alongside. "And at the end of it all ... there are still 24 million people without health insurance,' Levin writes. "Another sure winner.'

Not for real-world America. The Senate should kill the bill and force the White House and the congressional majority back to private-market principles that will rein in health care costs while making insurance more accessible.

To that end, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn is talking about forcing a full reading of the bill's nearly 2,100 pages. It might be the best way to get the Senate to grasp how bad this legislation is.