SCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREEEEEEE

The Senate health care reform bill now has a CBO score.

Told Ya So

You know that CBO agency that the GOP keeps hyping up whenever they have less than stellar reviews of the health care reform bills? Yeah well those guys have just come out with another report and it says that a public option will not drive private insurers out of business.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new government health insurance plan sought by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats could coexist with private insurers without driving them out of business, an analysis by nonpartisan budget experts suggests.

The estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — seen as good news by Democrats — comes as leaders pushed Monday to make progress on health care overhaul before lawmakers go home for their August recess.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says a floor vote is still possible in the next few days, and Democrats called a meeting of all their House members late Monday afternoon. In the Senate, a small group of lawmakers from both parties were resuming negotiations in search of an elusive compromise.

I can't wait to see the hypocrisy from the Republicans who will now assail CBO because they don't agree with their analysis.

Of course all of this really is a moot point when you have a dick head like Max Baucus chairing the Senate Finance committee who is bound and determined not to include a public option in his bill anyway.

I need a frikkin drink!

"The Point Of The Proposal, However, Was Never To Generate Savings Over The Next Decade."

That is perhaps the most important line amongst others in OMB Director Peter Orszag's letter about the new CBO study on the IMAC proposal. Of course he had to respond to the study in the first place because GOPolitico ran a story with the screaming headline "CBO deals new blow to health plan". But if the point was never to reach long term savings with the IMAC proposal then in reality its not a big blow at all. The point was cost containment, not savings.

But then you have Jake Tapper doing a story this morning and although he links to Orszag's and quotes from it, he omits the most important sentence in the letter in his analysis and he makes it out to be a food fight pitting Orszag against OMB director Doug Elmendorf. I asked Tapper about this omission on twitter and his response was.

i have only heard WH discuss IMAC in terms of cost containment

Now that, to me, sounds like Tapper is calling Peter Orszag a liar. To be honest with you I don't have a problem with it if that's what he is doing. However it would seem to me that he should have had the courage to say that in the post itself rather than ignore Orszag's statement in his analysis. Don't get me wrong, he did link to the letter so people were free to go and read the letter themselves. However we all know that its rare for people to go to the source material. They rely on the journalist to provide them with the truth. And it would seem in this situation that because Tapper was predisposed to believe that Orszag wasn't being truthful he omitted pretty much the most important sentence in that letter from his analysis.

Here is what I feel are the most important parts of the letter.

CBO noted that this type of approach could lead to significant long-term savings in federal spending on health care and that the available evidence implies that a substantial share of spending on health care contributes little, if anything, to the overall health of the nation. This supports what President Obama has said all along: we can reduce waste and unnecessary spending without reducing quality of care and benefits.

In part because legislation under consideration already includes substantial savings in Medicare over the next decade, CBO found modest additional medium-term savings from this proposal -- $2 billion over 10 years. The point of the proposal, however, was never to generate savings over the next decade. (Indeed, under the Administration’s approach, the IMAC system would not even begin to make recommendations until 2015.) Instead, the goal is to provide a mechanism for improving quality of care for beneficiaries and reducing costs over the long term. In other words, in the terminology of our belt-and-suspenders approach to a fiscally responsible health reform, the IMAC is a game changer not a scoreable offset.

With regard to the long-term impact, CBO suggested that the proposal, with several specific tweaks that would strengthen its operations, could generate significant savings. (The potential modifications included items such as providing mandatory funding for the council, rather than having the council rely on the annual appropriations cycle, and requiring independent verification of the expected reductions in program spending rather than relying only on the Medicare actuaries for such verification, along with other suggestions, such as including an across-the-board reduction in payments as a fallback mechanism if the council did not produce proposals that generated adequate savings.) And if you look back at recent history, one can see why an empowered advisory council would be useful. For example, for the better part of this decade, MedPAC has recommended reducing overpayments to insurance companies for Medicare Advantage plans – to equate those payments with the cost of covering the same beneficiary under traditional Medicare. Yet, nothing happened, costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. We can’t afford that type of inertia.

Basically what it boils down to is Orszag is saying "move along folks, nothing to see here" in response to the CBO study. Now the truth is for all I know Orzag is full of it and the CBO analysis really IS a huge blow to health care reform. But it would be nice if a journalist who was skeptical of Orszag statement was either earnest enough or brave enough to put that in their post on the subject rather than avoiding it all together.

Im just sayin.

President Obama Lied To Us

Remember President Obama said 75% of the spending in his economic stimulus and reinvestment act would be pushed into th economy in the next 18 months? Well according to the new CBO report on his plan thats a bald faced lie! Its actually going to be 78% over the next 18 months.

Suck On That Wing Nuts!!!



(h/t TPM)

More On That CBO "Report"

After two days of complaining by commenters at the Swampland blogs K Tizzle finally decided to weigh in by linking to an expert in federal spending, former staff director of the House Appropriations Committee Scott Lilly, and his view of the partial analysis of President Obama's economic stimulus package by the Congressional Budget Office which has been sold as a "report" by WingNuts and Villagers alike. Guess what he found...

Projecting this “spend out” is a task requiring the weighing of numerous variables as well as the exercise of a considerable amount of subjective judgment. In the end, spending forecasts are subject to most of the uncertainties contained in weather forecasts, economic forecasts, and even Super Bowl predictions. But what is clear from the leaked analysis (and will probably be evident in the official version soon to be available) is that the watch word of this stimulus effort—“shovel ready,” meaning ready to be spent now—does not correspond to any key on the keyboards connected to CBO computers.

Hmmm imagine that.

It is particularly hard to defend the CBO forecast on the flow of “shovel ready” highway funds. The projection for the flow of highway funds from this package is much slower than the projection made by CBO for the flow of funds under the same program only four month ago in the stimulus package Congress attempted to pass last fall. CBO predicted 77 percent of that money would flow out of the Treasury in the first 24 months. Now they are projecting that only 45 percent of highway money will flow over a 24-month period.

Whichever figure is correct—if either prove to be—the disparity between the two estimates seems to demonstrate that CBO highway estimates will have been seriously out of line at least 50 percent of the time.

Ok, but what about worst case scenario and the partial analysis is right.

But what if CBO is right in its current forecast? What if many of the appropriated funds in this package do flow more slowly than federal and local officials anticipate? The first point that needs to be considered is that the $355 billion contained in the Appropriation Committee portion of the package represents only 43 percent of the total package and virtually all of the slower spending programs.

Nearly all of the remaining $470 billion, which will be made up of tax cuts, Medicaid payments to states, and unemployment benefits, is expected to flow from the Treasury over the course of the next 12 months. The $108 billion contained in the appropriation segment of the package that CBO projects to be unspent at the end of 2011 totals only 13 percent of the total package.

And as for the CBO itself? He doesn't mince words.

As for CBO, I find their efforts with respect to this package disconcerting. The Constitution delegated the making of budget policy to Congress. When the Congressional Budget Act was passed 35 years ago, CBO was established not for the purpose of transferring that responsibility from Congress to a team of experts but for informing the congressional deliberations with philosophically neutral, well-informed, and fact-based analysis—analysis based on a continuous and thorough vetting of all relevant information and points of view.

While CBO is certainly “where the action is in federal budgeting,” as it boasts on its website, I am not convinced that they have met the standard for analysis that should be expected of them. The incoming director needs to carefully review these projections and insure that CBO protects its reputation for quality and objectivity

Now K Tizzle doesn't fancy herself a media critic and she is loathe to take her coworkers to task, but at least she took the time out to post on the issue and give the Swamplanders the truth. Thats a lot more than can be said for a lot of other "journalists".

Republicans And The MSM Just Making Shit Up As Usual

Over the past week or so we have seen Republicans trumpet and the Mainstream Media folks parrot, the conclusions of a Congressional Budget Office report that said President Obama's ecocnomic stimulus package wouldn't get much of the money included in the bill into the economy for two years. They have used this to decry the stimulus bill as "flawed" and as proof that instead it should be focused more on tax cuts which according to them would get money into the economy quicker. There was just one problem with that, the report doesn't exist.

From HuffPo:

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won't be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.
Funny thing is, there is no such report.

"We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study," a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.
Rather, the nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score -- how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.

Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.

The CBO numbers were given to a small number of congressional Democrats and Republicans, but were not posted online because they're not an official CBO product. (Media outlets, while reporting widely about the "report," have declined to post it online. Here's the whole thing.) Democratic aides say they are certain that the GOP leaked it to the Associated Press in order to undercut the spending portion of the stimulus.

A Republican aide for the House Appropriations Committee denied involvement, saying that her staff did not see the CBO numbers until after the AP reported them. The Washington Post followed the AP and reported that aides to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) provided the report.

So once again the Republican party is more interested in playing politics than doing what is right for the American people. How anybody could believe in these clowns at this point is beyond me. At some point you have to look past their rhetoric and evaluate their deeds and for the last 8 years there is no doubt that the GOP has been all about looking out for the GOP. And this illustrates yet another failure of the MSM. Instead of learning about their subterfuge from the Washington Post or the AP instead they became complicit in pushing the faux controversy. And then of course their MSM bretheren of all types picked up the story and ran with it. It should tell you something that it took the Huffington Post to investigate the report that does not exist in order for the truth to come our rather than CNN or the New York Times. Such is the state of journalism today.