MOVING THE CBO GOALPOSTS AND LEARNING FROM CLINTONS

Does a Congressional Budged Office (CBO) memo show that they've been directed by democrats to score the healthcare bill differently than they scored the healthcare plan put forth by the Clinton administration in 1994? The CATO institute's Michael Cannon has some compelling evidence that it does.

First, a little history. Like both the House and Senate bills, the Clinton health plan would have mandated that individuals and employers purchase private insurance. In its 1994 score of the Clinton plan, Bob Reischauer’s CBO included those mandated “private” payments in the federal budget –- i.e., as federal revenues and federal expenditures.

And yet, none of the CBO scores of this year’s bills include the costs of similar individual/employer mandates as federal revenues or federal spending.

My read of the CBO’s score of the Clinton health plan is that the private-sector mandates accounted for around 60 percent of the Clinton health plan’s total cost, the remainder being (traditional) government spending. So how is it that the CBO made the full cost of the Clinton health plan apparent to the public in 1994, but may now be revealing only 40 percent of the cost of the Obama health plan?

Is it me or does there seem to be some interesting parallels between climategate and Obamacare? This memo would seem to indicate the manipulation of data to arrive at a desired outcome in pursuit of a larger agenda. In true-to-Alinsky fashion, it would be a case of ends-justify-the-means tactics.

In addition to the CBO scoring apparently omitting some critically important data, the reason according to Cannon - and bolstered by the released memo is that the Obama administration knows Clintonian history relative to healthcare.

Quoting Cannon:

The Medical Loss Ratios memo is the smoking gun. It shows that indeed, Democrats have been submitting proposals to the CBO behind closed doors and tailoring their private-sector mandates to avoid having those costs appear in the federal budget.

Check out the MEMO for yourself.

Read it ALL

h/t to AS