GOP Senators Are Trying To Work The Refs As Obamacare Repeal Bill Stalls
By ALICE OLLSTEIN Published JULY 3, 2017 6:00 AM
A wide gulf continues to separate Republican senators as they furiously negotiate the fate of their health care bill after canceling a vote last week when it became evident it would go down in flames. While GOP senators cannot even agree on the basic questions of health care policy—whether people with pre-existing conditions should be protected from discrimination, whether or not to scrap Obamacare’s taxes on the wealthy, whether Obamacare should be repealed without a replacement ready—they have coalesced around a strategy of working the refs.
GOP senators want the Congressional Budget Office to produce new scores of the bill following the CBO’s brutal assessment that their original version would cause 22 million people to lose their health insurance over 10 years and drastically raise out-of-pocket costs for millions more.
Former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who helmed the office during the George W. Bush administration, told TPM this request is “extremely unusual, unprecedented probably.”
Holtz-Eakin, now the president of the conservative think tank American Action Forum, blasted the calls for the CBO to change its metrics midway through a multi-month health care repeal effort making its way through the House and Senate. He noted that when scoring the Affordable Care Act itself over nearly two years, the CBO kept using the same baseline even when it became out of date.
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