An `Obamacare' Cost Explosion? Hardly - 
GOP Distorts CBO Report
Sahil Kapur 
TPM
March 15, 2012
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/03/conservatives-distort-cbo-data-to-claim-obamacare-costs-have-exploded.php

Republicans and conservative media are cherry-picking a
figure in a new Congressional Budget Office spending
estimate (PDF) to assert that the cost of "Obamacare"
has nearly doubled to $1.76 trillion. But the claim
ignores the corresponding savings during the additional
period of the spending projection, thus distorting the
actual cost estimates of the law.

[moderator: the CBO report is found here -
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-13-Coverage%20Estimates.pdf]

"The new CBO projection estimates that the law will cost
$1.76 trillion over 10 years - well above the $940
billion Democrats originally claimed," Rep. Tom Price
(R-GA), the No. 4 House Republican, declared in a press
advisory. Republicans on the powerful Energy & Commerce
Committee said the CBO report "reveal[s] a shocking new
sticker price of $1.8 trillion."

Fox News and other conservative outlets have trumpeted
the out-of-context number as vindication for those who
warned that the Affordable Care Act will cost far more
than advertised.

CBO's actual revised estimate is that the "gross costs
of the coverage provisions," - the money used to provide
people Medicaid or private insurance - has risen by
about $50 billion over the 2012-2021 period since its
previous estimate, from $1.445 trillion to $1.496
trillion. That's the only relevant change to spending
projections in the report.

So where are conservatives getting the idea that the
cost of the law doubled? When it passed in 2010, CBO
said its 10-year outlays would be about $940 billion.
But because the law isn't set to be fully implemented
until 2014, when the coverage expansion takes effect,
that initial estimate included several years in which
the law cost very little. Now that it's 2012, CBO's 10-
year outlook captures more years during which the law
will be in full effect. The law's price tag appears
higher, but its costs in no way doubled.

Conservatives, however, want to use the effect of this
sliding window to make it appear as if the health care
law is a budget buster. But this latest CBO report
focuses exclusively on the law's spending provisions,
and ignores its savings - the taxes and spending cuts,
that also mostly take effect in 2014.

Indeed, CBO still holds that the law reduces the deficit
by billions of dollars over 10 years. That's just not in
this report.

"CBO and JCT have not estimated the budgetary effects in
2022 of the other provisions of the ACA; over the
2012-2021 period, those other provisions were previously
estimated to reduce budget deficits," the CBO report
reads.

All of which means that the cost projections have only
experienced minor changes in the CBO report, a far cry
from the conservative claims that the Affordable Care
Act's price tag has skyrocketed or doubled.

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