Blog - CBO Scores the Finance Committee Health Care Bill

The Congressional Budget Office’ highly anticipated (by members of the Senate Finance Committee and no one else) scoring of the Baucucs health care bill, as amended, has finally been released.

The big-picture budget numbers look good. The bill would cause federal spending to increase by $829 billion over 10 years, but would produce enough savings and increase enough taxes over the same time period to result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $81 billion. So, the bill is deficit neutral and then some. No problem there.

This, though, is less than impressive: “the number of nonelderly people who are uninsured would be reduced by about 29 million, leaving about 25 million nonelderly residents uninsured (about one-third of whom would be unauthorized immigrants).” This is the worst coverage estimate of all the health care bills moving through Congress. The House bill, for example, was estimated by the CBO to cover all but 17 million residents. But, hey, we’ve been waiting on the CBO score so we can be sure that the bill isn’t going to add to the deficit, not that it’s going to work well at expanding coverage.

The score released today should be enough to ensure an easy passage for the bill by the Finance Committee next week. But it’s also important to dig in deeper to see what kinds of insights can be gleaned from it for specific areas of improvement as the legislative process continues. Here’s a link to the full 27-page PDF file that the CBO released today.