RSS 2.0 FeedThe CBO Health Care Numbers Are Phony And Meaningless
by Doug MataconisWhile the Democrats in Congress will try to spin it otherwise, the truth about the CBO numbers released today can be found on the first page of CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf’s letter to Speaker Pelosi:
Although CBO completed a preliminary review of legislative language prior to its release, the agency has not thoroughly examined the reconciliation proposal to verify its consistency with the previous draft. This estimate is therefore preliminary, pending a review of the language of the reconciliation proposal, as well as further review and refinement of the budgetary projections.
In other words, this isn’t a final scoring of the the health care bill, and it isn’t complete because Congress hasn’t told the CBO what’s in the reconciliation package that they’ve supposedly been working on for a week now.
One Capitol Hill reporter stated on Twitter earlier that a final CBO scoring won’t be released until tomorrow, or Saturday. If that’s the case, then the 72 hour clock has NOT started running yet and we won’t see a vote on this until early next week.
Don’t let them fool you.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/03/problem-with-deficit-neutrality.html
Comment by jeff molby — March 18, 2010 @ 3:29 pm