[To be fair to Masscare, it seems the numbers the CBO used were all wrong]
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/06/did_the_congressional_budget_o.html
In an effort to buy some extra time to negotiate with
Republicans on the committee, the Democrats on HELP
[the House Education Labor and Pensions Committee]
left out some of
the more controversial policies in the hopes of reaching a
bipartisan agreement sometime this week. The public plan, the
employer mandate and the individual mandate were all absent from the
proposal the CBO examined. The employer and individual mandates --
the first of which pushes employers to offer coverage and the second
of which force individuals to purchase coverage -- are particularly
key to increasing the number of Americans with health insurance.
You might ask what the HELP Committee was thinking, sending Swiss
cheese legislation to CBO. Well, the HELP Committee's expectation
was that the CBO, in crafting its preliminary score, would assume
something similar to the outline it had seen months before. The CBO
didn't. In fact, it did the opposite. CBO ran its estimates with no
employer mandate and an individual mandate with a laughably small
penalty.
Members of HELP were thus shocked by yesterday's score. The specific
provisions of the bill that the CBO examined did not look like the
bill HELP intends to write. Which means that the numbers aren't
correct. If HELP is writing a bill with a strong employer and
individual mandate, and CBO scores a bill with no employer mandate
and a weak individual mandate, that's not a useful estimate.
By Monday night, members of the HELP Committee were scrambling to
give the CBO something closer to the final legislation to examine --
this time including rough details of the employer mandate and the
individual mandate. They're hoping to have a new set of estimates by
Friday, though that's probably ambitious. Either way, I wouldn't put
too much stock in these numbers.
By Ezra Klein | June 15, 2009; 11:59 PM ET