CBO score for Single Payer Health Care. Anyone have it ?

[rhombus]

Can someone please point me to a CBO score on single-payer health care? Links please. Has any member of Congress submitted a single payer bill to CBO for scoring? From all indications, single payer would solve a ton of the costs of reforming health care at half the price. But I still need to have an idea of the CBO score to refute some arguments I've seen from the other side.

Thanks!

[Thrill]

1. Not a chance they score that

[kath]

4. Yep - they're not going to touch that with a brazillion-foot pole.

[rhombus]

6. This is disappointing

If single payer can't even get a CBO score, then it confirms that the Dems are corporate-lite, very weak, and far from being progressive.

[Oregone]

2. Yeah, I got it here

Its somewhere between "Leave us the fuck alone" and "Not going to happen"

[rucky]

3. Off the table.

I think those requests have to come from committee, which we know is not discussing singe-payer options.

[MarjorieG]

5. What about for amedments (ie Weiner's). For bargaining, important to see S.P vs P.O vs without.

[boppers]

7. Uhm, what's the CBO score for the color "blue"?

"Single Payer" is a concept. Without something fully fleshed out, there's no way of getting a real number, and nobody's done (AFAIK) the massive amount of work required to flesh it out.

[ipaint]

8. Last time it was looked by cbo was 1993

December, 1993 Congressional Budget Office

S491 (Senator Paul Wellstone’s single payer bill) would raise national health expenditures above baseline by 4.8 percent in the first year after implementation. However, in subsequent years, improved cost containment and the slower growth in spending associated with the new system would reduce the gap between expenditures in the new system and the baseline. By year five (and in subsequent years) the new system would cost less than baseline. (“S.491, American Health Security Act of 1993”)

http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single_payer_system_cost.php?page=all



More info on the dirty dealing with the cbo behind our current reform.

"The CBO is noted for its impartiality in providing Congress with intellectually honest evaluations of various Congressional proposals. From Sen. Baucus’s comments, it’s obvious that this constitutes a major barrier to his ambitions to enact reform along the lines of his model. Rather than an arm’s-length analysis, Sen. Baucus is demanding that Dr. Elmendorf shift from the role of an impartial analyst to the role of a policymaker by becoming “creative,” making the “hard decisions,” to “find intellectually honest pathways to get the savings we have to have.”

We can understand Sen. Baucus’s frustration in his inability to obtain a favorable analysis of his highly flawed, “wish-they-would-work” policies. But we can fault him for demanding that Dr. Elmendorf compromise his professional integrity by participating in the policy decisions over a fundamentally flawed framework of reform, and then applying to the final product his personal stamp of endorsement. That is not and must never be the role of the CBO Director.

This also partially explains why Sen. Baucus is becoming ever more strident in his demand that single payer be totally excluded from the dialogue on reform. Innumerable analyses, including some by the CBO, have shown that the single payer model actually would achieve our goal of affordable health care for everyone. Objective, side-by-side CBO analyses would destroy any chance of convincing Congress to enact Sen. Baucus’s model.

Since reform should be based on the best data available, isn’t such an analysis exactly what we should have right now? If Sen. Baucus is sincere in wanting reform that works for all of us, he should be the first one to request that CBO do that study."

http://www.pnhp.org/blog/2009/03/02/sen-baucus-wants-cbo-to-be-creative/

[heppcatt]

9. Amy Goodman and Howard Dean were talking about this today

It won't happen.