Baucus To Economists On Scoring Health Reform: ‘In My Judgment, You’re Not God’
Baucus To Economists On Scoring Health Reform: ‘In My Judgment, You’re Not God’
Today’s Senate Finance Committee hearing underlined one of the more important lessons from President Clinton’s failed effort to reform the health care system: when pushing through your plan, don’t let economists be the messengers for reform.
A high Congressional Budget Office score sunk Clinton’s reform plan, and today’s Democrats are trying to challenge the importance of “the number.”
Henry Aaron, a senior economics fellow at the Brookings Institution, has noted that “it’s not infrequent to hear people say it doesn’t make any difference what it really costs. It only matters what CBO says it costs.” But health care, of course, is about more than just numbers. It’s about securing the health of the nation, and real reform will require an upfront investment that doesn’t make for a balanced budget sheet in the short term.
The Congressional Budget Office has admitted as much. It uses a limited amount of evidence to score changes, without really examining the interactions of separate policies (for which there is little evidence) and as Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) suggested, insofar as the CBO “tries to predict people’s reactions to our policy changes, it’s almost impossible.”
Consider this interesting exchange between Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf:
BAUCUS: We’re not in the old situation where whatever CBO says is God. In my judgment you’re not God. My judgment is that the press — there’s a whole new era and, um, you might be Moses, but not God. But I do believe that there are several different intellectually honest pathways to get from here to there. It’s not just one automatic. And so it mean we gotta be ever more creative to find intellectually honest pathways to get the savings we’re going to have to have [inaudible] politically to get health care reform.
Listen to the exchange:
Paul Begala made a very similar argument during the Families USA health care conference, urging Obama to ignore traditional economic caution. In fact, reforming health care on an economic tight rope, is like deciding to respond to a terror attack by first determining if you can fund it. In both cases, there are other factors one must consider.
3 Responses to “Baucus To Economists On Scoring Health Reform: ‘In My Judgment, You’re Not God’”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Wonk RoomContact Us
Donate
Interactions? What role will Dirty Max’s donor record play? He took donations from 8 for-profit health care companies with no facilities in Montana.
“intellectually honest pathways to get the savings we’re going to have to have [inaudible] politically to get health care reform.”
That’s dumping the cost for coverage onto the individual/employee. America’s leaders race to the lowest global common denominator on taxes and worker pay/benefits.
Max is sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. CEO’s need another boost for their incentive compensation. Ditching that pesky health insurance might do the trick.
February 25th, 2009 at 3:09 pmPat Roberts is R-KS, alas. If Kentucky wants him, they’re welcome to take him, of course.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:58 pmOne way (premiums, out-of-pocket) or another (taxes), we the people are paying for health care. Hence, one needs to clarify whether a proposal is actually controlling total costs (important), versus just federal government costs (not so important). Unfortunately CBO and GAO usually only consider the latter. Hence the good scoring for bad plans like Wyden’s.
President Obama falsely conflated the need for cost control and his proposal for health care reform. Unfortunately rhetoric aside, the mainstream inside-the-Beltway allowable proposals, including Obama/Baucus and Wyden, etc do NOT control costs. They actually explode costs. Nor do they get to 100% universality in coverage, and they are very bad in terms of comprhensiveness or quality of coverage.
Furthermore Wyden, and other plans that “reform” (aka: reduce) the tax credit while pushing to buy more private health insurance, just shift the total cost increase from the Federal Government back to States, employers and individuals. CBO and GAO may call it budget neutral or beneficial, but that is only to the Federal Governement purse. Since total costs go up, those costs are even more dumped on everybody else.
It may seem strange to some who don’t follow this closely, but the “single payer” and “medicare for all” proposals such as from Rep. Peter Stark and John Conyers are actually the economically sensible, fiscally conservative proposals, that really do control costs.
Don’t take my word for it. That is according to Commonwealth Fund and the Lewin Group, which do not support single payer/Medicare for All (they push their so-called Building Blocks proposal which is essentially the same as Obama/Baucus).
See more at the Commonwealth Fund Report and also at my blog posts on this subject today and a couple of weeks ago.
Wishing everybody,
February 25th, 2009 at 5:08 pmPeace & Health