If you believe the dribble from President Obama and the Democrats in Congress that everyone who’s happy with their current health insurance will be able to keep it under their “reforms,” then I’ve got 3 million jobs created under the stimulus for you and your friends to take.

The “keep your happy insurance” mantra was a complete lie to begin with, but with the proposal released today by Sens. Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy (well, his staff) we can see just how foolish and math-deficient the goons pushing the government plan really are.

The new Dodd-Kennedy plan comes in with an initial cost estimate that’s about $400 billion below the Congressional Budget Office’s $1 trillion price tag during the next decade from the initial proposal. While that estimate is definitely going to get bigger, it’s not the important part of the new plan.

Here’s the fun part:

Committee staffers reworked the bill — and added a new provision requiring most employers to contribute to the cost of health insurance — to arrive at the lower estimate. Under the new proposal, any business with more than 25 workers would be required to offer coverage or pay a $750 penalty per employee.

Gee. This sounds strikingly familiar.

Back in 2007, California’s esteemed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a similar plan. He would have required all employers in the state to provide health insurance for their employees or pay a 4 percent fine to the state to cover them instead.

After Schwarzenegger (really, we want to follow his lead?) proposed his plan, the publisher of the paper at which I was working remarked in a meeting that it was good news — he would have been more than willing to pay a mere 4 percent to the state than pay to provide insurance for all of us working in his newsroom.

The new, Obama-Dodd-Kennedy plan would have the same effect. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2003 American businesses spent between 6 percent and 9 percent of their payroll on health insurance. Going with the lower number, everyone working at any given company would need to make less than $13,000 a year for the $750 penalty to cost our bosses more than providing private insurance.

I remember back when I settled on making $13,000 a year. I think I had just turned 18 and demanded that I could take my summers off.

Median household income in the U.S. in 2007 was just over $50,000 a year. If that’s a two-income household, then employers are paying $1,500 to insure each of the two employees — about double the new fee for government to provide insurance. And again, that’s using the smaller estimate of how much employers spend to provide health insurance.

If you run a business, this will be an easy decision. Pay $1,500 per person in your employ and deal with the hassles of finding them an H.M.O., or pay half that amount to the federal government to do the job for you?

This is where Dodd’s and Kennedy’s numbers really go off the rails. They claim their plan will cost $611 billion during the next 10 years to provide coverage for a mere 39 percent of Americans who don’t have health insurance. Once companies begin dumping their employees into the federal system, just wait for the costs to balloon. There will be a lot more than 39 percent of the currently uninsured waiting in line at the government’s new medical clinics.

President Obama’s other health care lie is that all he wants to do is inject some more competition into the market — give those evil insurance companies a run for their money. “They need to be more competitive,” he says.

This plan is anything but about competition. If Obama thinks this is going to save health care in this country, spur the economy — as he said today — and make the market more competitive, then maybe he really did campaign in 57 states.