Water Over Gold asked: When CBO said the first healthcare bill would raise costs, Democrats claimed CBO didn’t look at all the *potential* cost savings. (Schumer, D-NY, even said the projection was “wacky”)
But when CBO uses THE SAME SCORING SYSTEM to say this current bill would *potentially* cut costs over time, Democrats hail it as proof this roughly $900 billion bill reduce the deficit and save people money.
What do you make of this?? Isn’t the CBO simply PROJECTING (guessing based on information available) and then the politicians spin the news to their advantage??
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=akyC7XoVI7EU
“Our preference far and away is for a bipartisan bill,” Schumer said. “If we can’t come to a bipartisan agreement, the Finance Committee will report out a Democratic bill.”
The New York senator said the CBO’s assessment that health-care costs would rise under legislation being considered by congressional Democrats doesn’t take into account savings from preventive care and efficiencies in the system.
“CBO’s scoring is a little bit wacky,” Schumer said of the nonpartisan agency’s estimates. “They are not quite fair because they don’t measure the cost savings down the road, just the immediate spending.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=akyC7XoVI7EU
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that Majority Leader Harry Reid’s 10-year, $848-billion bill would produce a net reduction of $130 billion in federal deficits in its first decade. Perhaps more significantly, the legislation would continue to give back over the next 10 years and beyond, the budget umpires said, because “added revenues and cost savings would probably be greater” than the cost of covering uninsured Americans.
The budget office put a big asterisk on its forecast, using words like “imprecision” and “uncertainty” to describe the long-range projection. It noted that, overall, health care spending remains on an unsustainable path.
However, the bill would not make matters any worse, and maybe even a little better.
With President Barack Obama pledging to tamp down ruinous health care costs, Democrats took the new CBO estimates to the bank, while skipping over the caveats. At a noontime rally with supporters, Reid, D-Nev., said the legislation would “save lives, save money and save Medicare.”
Standing shoulder to shoulder with other Democrats, Reid evoked a Democratic president who had tried to overhaul health care — Harry S. Truman — and said the bill “is not just a milestone in a journey of a few months or a few years. We have been working to reform health care since the first half of the last century.”
zap…………….I know what bill passed. THE POINT: CBO (the same people that scored the first) are scoring the second as well.
Carrie