Not being able to trust the organization that is tasked with scoring Congressional legislation is a major problem.
If you are unfamiliar with the Congressional Budget Office, it is a federal agency that provides budget and economic estimates to Congress about pieces of legislation. It’s sort of like a financial advisor to Congress, and the estimates it puts out weigh heavily on how some senators and representatives vote on certain proposals.
There has been arguably no more impactful law passed by Congress in the past decade than the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The CBO scored the effort to repeal Obamacare and estimated the number of people who would lose their insurance as a result of it. It said that 13 to 14 million people would lose insurance if Obamacare was repealed. The effort to repeal and replace failed.
We now find out that those numbers were off. Badly.
In February, a study published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services revealed that original government estimates, which were that 13 million people would lose coverage due to the elimination of the individual mandate, were off by over 10 million. CMS actuaries project the real number to be around 2.5 million.
As Washington Examiner columnist Philip Klein, who assembled this report, points out, this errant estimation has had enormous consequences in both the healthcare marketplace and with regard to taxation, as the original estimates served as the basis for President Trump’s tax cuts to become law.
In a column for the Examiner, Klein suggests that if the CBO projections had been more accurate, centrist Republicans might have voted for the measure, which would have changed the future of healthcare in the United States.
Klein, who calls the errant estimates “scandalous,” sums it up this way:
“Given the outsized influence that the CBO has on policymaking in Washington, the CBO’s misfire on the individual mandate should be a major story.”
It is a very big deal that this agency, upon which such important estimations are placed, failed to even enter the ballpark on a law that has and will continue to fundamentally change the nation.
To add to the confusion, President Trump and Republicans are now on the verge of offering a new health care plan. Eventually, the CBO is going to asked to score it. The numbers published by the agency will undoubtedly have a direct impact on whether enough members of Congress will support it to pass it.
Given its egregious error with Obamacare, how can the CBO’s analysis of a new plan be trusted?
