The closer Congress comes to passing some kind of health-care overhaul, the clearer it becomes that lawmakers have no intention of being honest about the balance sheet. The proposed overhaul now before the U.S. Senate is touted as having a cost of $829 billion in its first decade, including an $81 billion deficit reduction over the same period.

The U.S. House measure likely to be voted on this week is being sold as an $894 billion plan, but Democratic sources acknowledged on Tuesday that the tab is going to be at least $1.2 trillion, well above the $900 billion limit set by President Barack Obama.

Neither the House nor the Senate bill includes at least $245 billion that will be spent on Medicare reimbursements to doctors, even though this is an integral part of government health-care costs.

Nor do those estimates include the cost to states of provisions expanding eligibility for Medicaid. In the House plan, states are required to pick up 9 percent of the increase. That state share should be factored into the total cost of the overhaul, because that money comes out of taxpayers' pockets, too.

The cost of the Medicaid expansion proposed by the House is projected to cost states a total of $34 billion over 10 years.

A similar provision in the Senate overhaul plan has been projected to cost Ohio $922 million over five years.

But that's not all, according to the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan watchdog of federal finances. The House plan includes a provision called the Community Living and Assistance Services and Support Act.

This creates a new entitlement providing cash assistance to help pay for long-term care. Premiums would be collected from enrollees for five years before benefits begin to be paid out.

This delay between revenue collection and benefit payout creates a temporary $57 billion surplus, which lawmakers falsely claim as a "savings" that reduces the overall cost of the overhaul. This is an accounting trick. Because that fund is committed to be paid out to beneficiaries, the money is not available to offset any other health-care costs. Therefore, it is not a savings.

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that this entitlement soon would become insolvent because to pay for it, benefits would have to be reduced or premiums increased to the point where few people would opt to participate in the program. Analyzing a Senate version of this entitlement, the American Academy of Actuaries reported in July that the program would be unsustainable.

The only way to keep it alive would be for Congress to pump more money into it, which would increase the cost of the overhaul.

But there's an even bigger disconnect.

Last month, in a speech urging passage of the health-care overhaul, Obama declared that "our health-care problem is our deficit problem" and that controlling increases in the cost of health care would help stem federal red ink. But the Concord Coalition notes that "all of the bills that Congress has produced focus on expanding insurance coverage, not controlling costs. Indeed, to the extent that they would save any money at all, it is merely to offset the extra budgetary cost of more -- not less -- health-care spending."

The coalition's analysis goes on to detail how lawmakers' confident assertions about rooting out waste and improving efficiency simply can't be achieved to a degree that would significantly reduce the incessant increase in health-care costs.

Americans want an improvement in the nation's health-care system, not only for themselves but for their neighbors. But they should not be saddled with an unsustainable, unaffordable overhaul sold to them with accounting gimmicks and rosy projections.