An Important Note on Budget Scorekeeping
In the context of Sen. Mikulski’s allegation that Republicans don’t want a CBO score of the health care law, it’s worth highlighting CBO’s report on the long-term budget outlook, released in June. In that report, CBO also released an alternative fiscal scenario that assumes many of the major savings provisions in the law – the productivity adjustments to providers, reductions in the growth of insurance subsidies, and caps on Medicare spending enforced by the Independent Payment Advisory Board – will not be implemented after 2020. In its introduction to the report (page 4 of the PDF), CBO noted that “the alternative fiscal scenario incorporates several changes to current law that are widely expected to occur or that would modify some provisions of law that might be difficult to sustain for a long period.”
It’s certainly interesting that Democrats NEVER asked CBO to score the health care law according to its alternative baseline scenarios – i.e., what CBO itself actually thinks will happen as the law is implemented, as opposed to what Democrats told CBO to assume will happen. CBO has spent the past few weeks doing its annual updates to the budgetary baseline, which is one reason why a formal score of the House-passed repeal bill (H.R. 2) was not released prior to a floor vote. But at some point, CBO may actually release a score of the bill under those alternative (i.e., what CBO considers more realistic) assumptions. And that document will be VERY interesting reading for Democrats and Republicans alike.