Notes on CBO skepticism
Ezra Klein
WashPost
My colleague Neil Irwin has a very good piece on the difficulty the Congressional Budget Office has predicting the cost of something complex like the health-care reform bill. But because his piece is coming in the context of a coordinated conservative effort to discredit the CBO's analysis of the health-care reform bill, it's worth making a couple of points.
First, be very careful with any criticism of CBO that seems to be merited by a particular score rather than a particular methodological difficulty. To put that slightly differently, does anyone think that conservatives would be squawking if CBO had disappointed Democrats by saying the bill would save less money than either the House or Senate incarnations? If not, then keep in mind that this is a political, not technical, dispute. To establish my own credentials on this, here's the post I wrote defending the CBO when liberals were arguing that it was underestimating health-care reform's savings.
Second, don't confuse uncertainty with bias. It's true that the CBO's estimates of the health-care reform bill are uncertain. But that cuts both ways. A lot of very respected health-care economists and experts think the CBO is being way too conservative in how much the bill's payment reforms will save. Historically, CBO has frequently underestimated the savings from health-care reform legislation. To use one example, they heavily overestimated the cost of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. More examples here.
(Continued here.)
WashPost
My colleague Neil Irwin has a very good piece on the difficulty the Congressional Budget Office has predicting the cost of something complex like the health-care reform bill. But because his piece is coming in the context of a coordinated conservative effort to discredit the CBO's analysis of the health-care reform bill, it's worth making a couple of points.
First, be very careful with any criticism of CBO that seems to be merited by a particular score rather than a particular methodological difficulty. To put that slightly differently, does anyone think that conservatives would be squawking if CBO had disappointed Democrats by saying the bill would save less money than either the House or Senate incarnations? If not, then keep in mind that this is a political, not technical, dispute. To establish my own credentials on this, here's the post I wrote defending the CBO when liberals were arguing that it was underestimating health-care reform's savings.
Second, don't confuse uncertainty with bias. It's true that the CBO's estimates of the health-care reform bill are uncertain. But that cuts both ways. A lot of very respected health-care economists and experts think the CBO is being way too conservative in how much the bill's payment reforms will save. Historically, CBO has frequently underestimated the savings from health-care reform legislation. To use one example, they heavily overestimated the cost of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. More examples here.
(Continued here.)
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1 Comments:
What were the politicians promises in regards to the cost of social security? Medicare?
Would those who are for this bill add an amendment promising to reduce spending, dollar for dollar, in other areas if costs of Obomacare exceed CBO projections?
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