When a government report found that President Barack Obama's health overhaul would modestly raise the nation's total health care tab, the White House responded with a statistic suggesting costs would go down. "It's not that it's false, it's just that it will be a little misleading," John Allen Paulos, a mathematics professor at Temple, said of the White House number, calling it an "apples-to-oranges miscomparison." According to one scenario, total national health spending could go up, but because more people are covered, spending per insured person goes down to $1,250. Paulos said it would make more sense to first figure out the share of total national health care spending by people with health insurance, and then divide that result by the number of insured people — before and after the health care law.