Letter to John Boehner providing an estimate for H.R. 6079, the Repeal of Obamacare Act

Congressional Budget Office ^ | 7/24/2012 | Self

[Positive]

I have omitted the estimates because of the disclaimer below.

Why Are These Estimates Uncertain?

Projections of the budgetary impact of H.R. 6079 are quite uncertain because they are based, in large part, on projections of the effects of the ACA, which are themselves highly uncertain. Assessing the effects of making broad changes in the nation’s health care and health insurance systems requires estimates of a broad array of technical, behavioral, and economic factors.

Separating the incremental effects of the provisions in the ACA that affect spending for ongoing programs and revenue streams becomes more uncertain as the time since enactment grows. The recent Supreme Court decision that essentially made the expansion of the Medicaid program a state option has also increased the uncertainty of the estimates. However, CBO and JCT, in consultation with outside experts, have devoted a great deal of care and effort to the analysis of health care legislation in the past few years, and the agencies have strived to develop estimates that are in the middle of the distribution of possible outcomes.

[Positive]

I other words they have spent a lot of time and OUR money creating guestimates based on guestimates and questionable cost and savings assertions which are themselves guestimates which are biased.

So this all means nothing...

Note that in 2009 the CBO forcast the Deficit for 2010 as $703 Billion... CBO reports the actual Defict for 2010 as $1,294 Billion... only off by $591 Billion or 84%... how useful are they????

[sam_paine]

The total snabit value of the incremental snomnibus costs are offset by &655 trillion in subsecrated budgingtons.

Simply ascertain the exchange rate between “the dollar” and the above to calculate the underset.

Since they make so many cents that nobody knows how to value the dollar in snabits or budgingtons, it will never make any sense.

[BfloGuy]

CBO reports the actual Defict for 2010 as $1,294 Billion

I like that you use billions instead of trillions. It's a much clearer way to express these almost incomprehensible numbers.

[Positive]

Precisely, and what about the clawbacks and freeriders, DoctorFixs and QE3????

[DrC]

This statement at the end of the report actually is more revealing: “Those calculations incorporate an assumption that the provisions of current law would otherwise remain unchanged throughout the next two decades. However, current law includes a number of policies that might be difficult
to sustain over a long period of time. For example, the ACA reduced payments to many Medicare providers relative to what the government would have paid under prior law. On the basis of those cuts in payment rates and the existing “sustainable growth rate” mechanism that governs Medicare’s payments to physicians, CBO projects that Medicare spending (per beneficiary, adjusted for overall inflation) will increase significantly more slowly during the next two decades than it has increased during the past two decades. If those provisions would subsequently be modified or implemented incompletely even in the absence of H.R. 6079, then the
budgetary effects of H.R. 6079 could be quite different—but CBO cannot forecast future changes in law or assume such changes in its estimates.”

The Medicare actuary now issues 2 sets of projections: “current law” projections (equivalent to CBO’s in terms of assuming that Obamacare is implemented exactly as specified in the law) and an “alternative fiscal scenario” that makes much more realistic assumptions about which components of Obamacare are likely NOT to be implemented because they are unrealistically draconian (e.g., paying doctors under Medicare 70% less than what they’d be paid by private health insurers). Needless to say, Medicare spending is far higher under the second set of assumptions than the first, which is to say that Obamacare actually will contribute to rising rather than shrinking deficits.

[DrC]

Using more realistic assumptions about Obamacare’s impact, the former director of CBO estimates Obamacare will add $2 trillion to deficits over the next 2 decades. http://americanactionforum.org/sites/default/files/health_reform_to_increase_deficit.pdf

This estimate was made in 2010, but there’s no way the Supreme Court decision would appreciably alter the net impact of the law on the deficit, i.e., changing a $2T deficit increase into a decrease etc.