Writing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner does a great job of explaining some of the shenanigans the House resorted to when underestimating the price tag for its health care legislation. For example:
Under current law, there is supposed to be a 21 percent cut in
reimbursements to Medicare providers next year. But no one in
Washington seriously believes that Congress will let that happen. In
fact, those cuts have been supposed to take place every year since
2003. And every year Congress postpones them until the following year.However, in order to pretend that their bill costs less than it
actually does, the Democrats simply assume that this time Congress will
let those cuts take effect. Then, in an unparalleled display of
cynicism, they have introduced a separate bill repealing those cuts at
a cost of $200 billion.That means that the cost of the “doc fix” isn’t technically part of
health care reform. And your household budget would look so much better
if you didn’t have to pay your mortgage and car payment. (The Senate
tried to do something similar, only to have the cynical ploy rejected
53-47, with 13 Democrats refusing to play along.)Moreover, the CBO provides 10-year projections of a bill’s cost,
between 2010 and 2019 in this case. Yet, while the taxes and other
revenue measures in the bill kick in immediately, most of the spending
doesn’t take effect until 2014.So the “10-year” cost projection includes only six years of the
bill. Wouldn’t it be great if you could count a whole month’s income,
but only two weeks’ expenditures in your household budget?If we look at the bill more honestly over the first 10 years that
the programs are actually in existence, say from 2014 to 2024, it would
actually cost nearly $3 trillion.
I wrote about related issues here.
