This morning's Congressional Budget Office score is nothing more than a smoke screen to distract the public. The core issue remains the ugly details of the U.S. Senate health care bill the House will try to "deem to have passed" this Sunday.
Passage of the Senate bill would increase Texans' health insurance premiums by 61 percent over the next five years. Passage of the Senate bill would increase Texas' Medicaid population by 50 percent and Texas' budget deficit by several billion dollars. Passage of the Senate bill could expose Texas medical providers to more than 20 new types of medical malpractice lawsuits and pre-empt the tort reforms approved by Texas voters. All of this means that Texans' health care costs would go up, while our access to quality health care would go down.
The CBO admitted that the numbers it released this morning were merely an educated guess, as "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."
However, the CBO estimate continues to double-count $463 billion in Medicare cuts that are unlikely to occur in the first place, as well as $53 billion in Social Security payroll taxes that are already committed to paying for future benefits. Once these and other smoke-and-mirrors tricks are removed from the analysis, the Senate's health care legislation would increase the deficit nearly $600 billion in the first decade and by more than $1.6 trillion in its second decade.
Beyond that, the latest reconciliation draft postpones a more onerous tax on so-called "Cadillac" health plans until the end of the decade. Given that this tax is one of the unions' most hated provisions and that the changes will hit a broad swath of the middle class, it is almost certainly to be repealed before it can take effect, which further guts the deficit reduction promises after 2018.
Sunday's House vote would only assure that the Senate bill would go to the White House for President Obama's signature. Any "reconciliation" provisions sent back to the Senate can be struck on parliamentary grounds, and the Senate leadership has little incentive to pass a reconciliation bill once its health care legislation has already been signed into law. That increases the likelihood that the Cornhusker Kickback, Gator Aid, Louisiana Purchase, and all of the other sweetheart deals in the Senate bill will become federal law.
Perhaps the same philosophy of "more government spending will help the economy" that we saw with the stimulus bill has affected the thinking in Washington with regard to the health care bill. Is spending trillions of tax dollars, enacting costly mandates, and federalizing health care decisions really the way to improve health care in America?
The Honorable Arlene Wohlgemuth is Executive Director and Director of the Center for Health Care Policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin. She served 10 years in the Texas House of Representatives, specializing in health care issues.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit free-market research institute based in Austin.
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