Posts Tagged ‘CBO’

By JENNIFER HABERKORN, Politico.com, 5/12/2010

Congressional Budget Office estimates released Tuesday predict the health care overhaul will likely cost about $115 billion more in discretionary spending over ten years than the original cost projections.

The additional spending - if approved over the years by Congress - would bring the total estimated cost of the overhaul to over $1 trillion.

Republicans pounced on the news, which they called another sign that the Obama administration makes promises it cannot deliver.

“The American people wanted one thing above all from health care reform: lower costs, which Washington Democrats promised, but they did not deliver,” said House Minority Leader John A Boehner (R-Ohio). “It was clearly irresponsible for Washington Democrats to force this legislation through Congress without being truthful about its full impact on the nation’s finances. Republicans are fighting to repeal this job-killing health care law and replace it with reforms focused first on lowering costs and protecting American jobs.”

Read more at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37081.html

I suppose that this is really news, but we already knew that these estimates can only go up. Do YOU think that these are the final estimates?  So . . . REPEAL IT!

By Shawn Tully, senior editor at large, May 6, 2010

(Fortune) — The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill is how the corporations that provide coverage for most Americans — coverage they know and prize — will react to the new law’s radically different regime of subsidies, penalties, and taxes. Now, we’re getting a remarkable inside look at the options AT&T, Deere, and other big companies are weighing to deal with the new legislation.

Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill’s critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government.

That would dismantle the employer-based system that has reigned since World War II. It would also seem to contradict President Obama’s statements that Americans who like their current plans could keep them. And as we’ll see, it would hugely magnify the projected costs for the bill, which controls deficits only by assuming that America’s employers would remain the backbone of the nation’s health care system.

Hence, health-care reform risks becoming a victim of unintended consequences. Amazingly, the corporate documents that prove this point became public because of a different set of unintended consequences: they told a story far different than the one the politicians who demanded them expected.

Read more at http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/05/news/companies/dropping_benefits.fortune/

By Drew Zahn, WorldNetDaily, April 27, 2010

Following release of an official report that estimates “Obamacare” will cost $311 billion more than advertised and could force 14 million Americans off their employer-provided insurance, a new allegation has surfaced that the White House knew of the unflattering analysis weeks before the health-care bill was passed and intentionally hid it from Congress.

According to a controversial article in the American Spectator, the Medicare and Medicaid Office of the Actuary delivered the damning report to the Department of Health and Human Services weeks before Congress voted on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius refused to review it until after the vote.

“The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote,” an unnamed HHS source reportedly told American Spectator.

Read more at  http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=146665

What did he know, and when did he know it?

Goldman Sachs hides emails, Obama hides reports, Coincidence?

Transparency?

by Matt Welch, from the April 2010 issue of Reason Magazine

Here’s how predictable the president’s slippery relationship with the truth has become: Hours before the State of the Union address, Washington Examiner reporter Timothy P. Carney posted a “pre-emptive fact check” that, among other things, prebutted any presidential claim to have “stopped the revolving door between government and corporate lobbying.” As it happened, that night Barack Obama made an even bolder (read: less truthful) claim: that “we’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.”

–SNIP–  As such defiance suggests, this was no isolated slip of the tongue. The president, who promised in both word and style to usher in a “new era” of Washington “responsibility,” routinely says things that aren’t true and supports initiatives that break campaign promises. When called on it, he mostly keeps digging. And when obliged to explain why American voters are turning so sharply away from his party and his policies, Obama pins the blame not on his own deviations from verity but on his failure to “explain” things “more clearly to the American people.”

Read more at http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/09/obama-and-the-l-word

By David M. Dickson, The Washington Times, Friday, March 26, 2010

President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president’s budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

“An additional $1.2 trillion in debt dumped on [GDP] to our children makes a huge difference,” said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That represents an additional debt of $10,000 per household above and beyond the federal debt they are already carrying.

Read more at  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/26/cbos-2020-vision-debt-will-rise-to-90-of-gdp/

by Shikha Dalmia, Forbes, March 24, 2010

Americans will lose control over basic decisions if this law stands.

President Barack Obama came into office promising hope and change. But he might get more change than he hoped for. By foisting ObamaCare on a deeply unwilling country he might have set the stage for the largest civil disobedience movement since the civil rights era, which, if it plays its cards right, could undo his legislation and his legacy.

–SNIP– It is hardly surprising then that Americans are feeling a growing panic as they watch their constitutional republic descend into a banana republic. President Obama is fond of quoting Mahatma Gandhi’s line that “we should be the change we want to see.” But Gandhi also said that “civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless and corrupt.” Americans instinctively understand this which is why pockets of resistance to ObamaCare are already emerging. The question is only whether they can be constructively harnessed into a grassroots, Gandhi-style civil disobedience movement powerful enough to undo this monstrosity.

–SNIP– This can’t be done by threatening a civil war–even metaphorically–against them. Gandhi’s ahimsa–or nonviolent resistance that seeks to change minds by a firm and calm expression of one’s own conscience –is a far better strategy.

To this end, the perpetrators of ObamaCare must be defeated in November and 2012. But right now it is entirely appropriate for Senate Republicans to stall the reconciliation process as much as possible. They are right in calling every point of order that they can–if only to call attention to the bill’s manifest corruption. Likewise, the 30-plus states that are issuing sovereignty resolutions and exploring ballot initiatives that would protect their residents from Uncle Sam’s coverage diktat are on the right track. Even if these efforts are ultimately thrown out in court because federal law trumps state law, they will make a powerful statement against the coercive nature of ObamaCare.

–SNIP– After all, this issue is not just about the fate of an industry. It is about maintaining control over basic decisions about one’s own life and health. The stakes are too high to let ObamaCare stand.

Read more at http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/23/obamacare-politics-united-states-reform-opinions-columnists-shikha-dalmia.html

H.R. 4872 includes a reconciliation provision to alter federal student loan programs by eliminating the Federal Family Education Loan program and shifting all student loans to a government-run and taxpayer financed system under the Direct Loan program. While this legislation has nothing to do with the government takeover of health care, the provision scores as reducing the deficit by $19.4 billion, which is used as an offset against the $1 trillion cost of the legislation. However, CBO has also noted that current budget scoring rules do not include the cost to the government stemming from the risk that the cash flows may be less than the amount projected (that is, that defaults could be higher than projected).

Read more at http://www.gop.gov/policy-news/10/03/19/the-government-takeover-of-healthcare

by Brian Riedl, The Corner at National Review, Feb. 25, 2010

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has produced a new report estimating that the $862 billion stimulus has thus far saved or created 1.5 million jobs. Yet the CBO’s calculations are not based on actually observing the economy’s recent performance. Rather, they used an economic model that was programmed to assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs — thus guaranteeing their result.

Logicians call this the begging-the-question fallacy. Mathematicians call it assuming what you are trying to prove.

The CBO model started by automatically assuming that government spending increases GDP by pre-set multipliers, such as:

Read more at http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZWVjZTI0Yzg5MTg2YjQ3NDEyYzQ3OTNmNWQ2N2EzN2Y=

By Philip Klein, American Spectator, December 23, 2009

After allowing Democrats for weeks to argue that their Medicare cuts would both help finance the new health care legislation and extend the solvency of Medicare, the Congressional Budget Office explained today that the bill could do one or the other, but not both at the same time.

Read more at http://spectator.org/blog/2009/12/23/now-they-tell-us-cbo-double-co

* * * * * * *
And not only did the double-count the savings from the Medicare cut, the expect us to believe that cutting funding for a program that’s already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy is going to result in deficit reduction.

Of course, I don’t think they were ever really serious about making these cuts anyway. Once this bill is passed and their foot is in the door with the health care bill they’ll skip the cuts and start ringing up the deficits and debt.

Read more at http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/shocker_cbo_double-counted_deficit_savings_from_medicare_cuts/

by Jeffrey H. Anderson, Weekly Standard blog, December 19, 2009

With Obamacare, you get the good, the bad, and the ugly — except for the first part.

The Congressional Budget Office’s score is in for the final Senate health bill, and it’s amazing how little Americans would get for so much.

The Democrats are irresponsibly and disingenuously claiming that the bill would cost $871 billion over 10 years. But that’s not what the CBO says. Rather, the CBO says that $871 billion would be the costs from 2010 to 2019 for expansions in insurance coverage alone. But less than 2 percent of those “10-year costs” would kick in before the fifth year of that span. In its real first 10 years (2014 to 2023), the CBO says that the bill would cost $1.8 trillion — for insurance coverage expansions alone. Other parts of the bill would cost approximately $700 billion more, bringing the bill’s full 10-year tab to approximately $2.5 trillion — according to the CBO.

In those real first 10 years (2014 to 2023), Americans would have to pay over $1 trillion in additional taxes, over $1 trillion would be siphoned out of Medicare (over $200 billion out of Medicare Advantage alone) and spent on Obamacare, and deficits would rise by over $200 billion. They would rise, that is, unless Congress follows through on the bill’s pledge to cut doctors’ payments under Medicare by 21 percent next year and never raise them back up — which would reduce doctors’ enthusiasm for seeing Medicare patients dramatically.

. . .  And this is the bill that Ben Nelson has decided to support?

Read more at http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/12/cbo_real_10year_cost_of_senate.asp