Fix Health Care Policy

Take CBO Report With a Grain of Salt: Obamacare Repeal Would Not Increase Deficits

Next week, the House of Representatives will vote on H.R. 2, a measure to repeal Obamacare in its entirety. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today released a report stating that repealing the health care law would increase the deficit by $145 billion between 2012 and 2019.

This report is based on the findings of the CBO’s March 2010 report that predicted that Obamacare would reduce the deficit. CBO does respectable work, but their analysts have their hands tied by assumptions they are required to make. The reality is that, in spite of the March report, Obamacare will not reduce the deficit, so repealing it would not add to the deficit, in spite of today’s report.

The CBO report should be taken with a grain of salt for a few reasons. First, CBO is required to assume that current law will be enacted as written, even in cases where reality couldn’t be further from what is on the books. CBO Director Doug Elmendorf himself makes this clear in the report: (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: CBO, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf, deficit, ObamaCare

Obamacare’s True Costs Coming to Light

Remember how President Barack Obama promised that his health care plan would reduce the deficit and put us on a path towards fiscal responsibility? Remember how Congress kept gaming the system to come up with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score that could justify those claims? Well, now that Obamacare has become (hopefully only temporarily) the law of the land, the CBO is singing a slightly different tune. Last Friday CBO Director Doug Elmendorf wrote on his blog:

“The central challenge is straightforward and stark: The rising costs of health care will put tremendous pressure on the federal budget during the next few decades and beyond.”

“In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure. In fact, CBO estimated that the health legislation will increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care (which CBO defines as the sum of net federal outlays for health programs and tax preferences for health care) by nearly $400 billion during the 2010-2019 period. Looking further ahead, CBO estimated that the legislation would reduce the federal budgetary commitment to health care in the following decade—if the provisions of the legislation remain unchanged throughout that entire period.”

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Tags: CBO, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf, CLASS Act, doc fix, job-based coverage, Medicare cuts, ObamaCare

In Their Own Words: CBO Admits Obamacare Unsustainable

This Wednesday CBO Director Doug Elmendorf gave a slide presentation on Capitol Hill titled: Health Costs and the Federal Budget. Elemendorf’s very first slide reads:

“Rising health costs will put tremendous pressure on the federal budget during the next few decades and beyond. In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure.”

The presentation concludes:

“Putting the federal budget on a sustainable path would almost certainly require a significant reduction in the growth of federal health spending relative to current law (including this year’s health legislation).”

In other words, our nation’s budget is on an unsustainable path and Obamacare did nothing to change that.

Tags: CBO Director Doug Elmendorf, federal budget, ObamaCare, rising health costs, unsustainable