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White House video misleads on CBO health-care estimates
Source: Washington Post
White House video misleads on CBO health-care estimates
By Glenn Kessler July 24 at 3:00 AM
The venerable Congressional Budget Office is under attack. Established in 1975 by Congress to provide independent analyses of legislation, the nonpartisan agency is under fire for its estimates of the effect of Republican proposals to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
This is not a new position for the agency. The CBO’s refusal to credit much budget savings to Hillary Clinton’s 1993 health-care plan is one of the factors that killed her effort during the Bill Clinton administration. But the rhetoric attacking it this time around certainly seems sharper. All eight previous CBO directors issued a joint letter last week to congressional leadership “to express our strong objection to recent attacks on the integrity and professionalism of the agency and on the agency’s role in the legislative process.”
A recent video posted by the White House is a case in point. Titled “Reality Check,” it claims the “Congressional Budget Office’s math does not add up.” In particular, it makes two key claims — that the CBO “inaccurately measures health coverage” and that it uses “faulty assumptions and bad numbers.”
How valid is the White House case?
The Facts
“Inaccurately estimates health coverage”
This claim is based on the fact that the CBO, in its initial estimate of the ACA, projected that in 2017, 25 million people would be enrolled in the Obamacare exchanges; today, 10.3 million are. It sounds like a big miss, but the White House is playing a shell game here, highlighting a subset of the data.
-snip-
Three Pinocchios
By Glenn Kessler July 24 at 3:00 AM
The venerable Congressional Budget Office is under attack. Established in 1975 by Congress to provide independent analyses of legislation, the nonpartisan agency is under fire for its estimates of the effect of Republican proposals to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
This is not a new position for the agency. The CBO’s refusal to credit much budget savings to Hillary Clinton’s 1993 health-care plan is one of the factors that killed her effort during the Bill Clinton administration. But the rhetoric attacking it this time around certainly seems sharper. All eight previous CBO directors issued a joint letter last week to congressional leadership “to express our strong objection to recent attacks on the integrity and professionalism of the agency and on the agency’s role in the legislative process.”
A recent video posted by the White House is a case in point. Titled “Reality Check,” it claims the “Congressional Budget Office’s math does not add up.” In particular, it makes two key claims — that the CBO “inaccurately measures health coverage” and that it uses “faulty assumptions and bad numbers.”
How valid is the White House case?
The Facts
“Inaccurately estimates health coverage”
This claim is based on the fact that the CBO, in its initial estimate of the ACA, projected that in 2017, 25 million people would be enrolled in the Obamacare exchanges; today, 10.3 million are. It sounds like a big miss, but the White House is playing a shell game here, highlighting a subset of the data.
-snip-
Three Pinocchios
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/07/24/white-house-video-misleads-on-cbo-health-care-estimates/