Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.)
requested on Tuesday that members of the Senate Finance Committee
hearing investigate discrepancies between the Congressional Budget
Office’s original cost estimates for the Affordable Care Act and its
latest estimates.
In a letter to Senate
Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Ron Wyden (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Roberts requested that the committee
investigate why the CBO’s recent projection that the healthcare law will
cost $2 trillion is more than double its original estimation.
“We rely on CBO to be a
non-partisan resource for Congress, but we also depend on their
projections to reflect a level of accuracy to allow us to make the best
decisions on behalf of the people we serve,” Roberts said. “If the
original estimates had contained the information in the most recent CBO
projections, we might have been able to prevent the mess that is
Obamacare today. At least the public would have had a much better
understanding of the true costs, and I believe that would have impacted
the debate.”
Roberts said legislators
questioned the CBO’s original cost estimates because costs of related
legislative actions such as efforts to reform Medicare’s sustainable
growth rate were not included.
“…I believe CBO should explain the drastic difference between their
earlier numbers and most recent projections and that the Finance
Committee should examine ways to ensure transparent and accurate
projections are presented for accompanying legislation in the future,”
Roberts said.
The post Roberts calls for investigation into CBO healthcare estimates appeared first on Ripon Advance.
My Comment: A trillion dollars is a lot of money! Increasing the estimate from 1 trillion to 2 trillion as the public cost for Obamacare for the next ten years is not just a minor mistake. The Congressional Budget Office has always been a respected institution where number crunchers provide unbiased information on cost of legislation and financial projections. To miss a 1 trillion dollar projection by 1 trillion dollars leads one to believe the CBO is no longer objective and is offering projections to aid the Obama administration and the Democrats or they are highly incompetent.
In one sense this doubling of the projection is good news. It confirms we were sold a pig in a poke. Obamacare was build on lies from day one. The if-you-like- your-doctor-you-can-keep-your-doctor-period lie and the lie that premiums would decrease and now we discover the "not 1 trillion dollars, but 2 trillion dollars" lie. Congress did not know what they were voting on when they passed it.
This also illustrates that the program is not sustainable. Obamacare will have the same impact on the Federal Government that TennCare had on our State government. The only difference is the State has to balance its budget and the Federal Government can create money out of thin air, but even borrowing will have its limits. I predict that as time passes more and more people will realized Obamacare is a flawed law. I just hope the result is that we more toward a market model of health care rather than a single payer model. If I were a cynical conspiracy theorist, I would conclude that Obamacare was designed to fail so we would eventually get single-payer.
My Comment: A trillion dollars is a lot of money! Increasing the estimate from 1 trillion to 2 trillion as the public cost for Obamacare for the next ten years is not just a minor mistake. The Congressional Budget Office has always been a respected institution where number crunchers provide unbiased information on cost of legislation and financial projections. To miss a 1 trillion dollar projection by 1 trillion dollars leads one to believe the CBO is no longer objective and is offering projections to aid the Obama administration and the Democrats or they are highly incompetent.
In one sense this doubling of the projection is good news. It confirms we were sold a pig in a poke. Obamacare was build on lies from day one. The if-you-like- your-doctor-you-can-keep-your-doctor-period lie and the lie that premiums would decrease and now we discover the "not 1 trillion dollars, but 2 trillion dollars" lie. Congress did not know what they were voting on when they passed it.
This also illustrates that the program is not sustainable. Obamacare will have the same impact on the Federal Government that TennCare had on our State government. The only difference is the State has to balance its budget and the Federal Government can create money out of thin air, but even borrowing will have its limits. I predict that as time passes more and more people will realized Obamacare is a flawed law. I just hope the result is that we more toward a market model of health care rather than a single payer model. If I were a cynical conspiracy theorist, I would conclude that Obamacare was designed to fail so we would eventually get single-payer.
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