patrick.net

One of the Obama administration's major selling points in passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was a Congressional Budget Office forecast that the controversial legislation would reduce the deficit by more than $120 billion over the coming decade.

The CBO has consistently projected that President Obama's overhaul will reduce the deficit, and the agency estimated that the Republicans’ 2011 effort to repeal the legislation would increase deficits by $210 billion from 2010 to 2021.

In April, the agency quietly signaled that it can no longer make that projection; that the law had been changed and delayed so much that there is no longer a credible way to estimate the long-term effects on the deficit of all elements of the program taken together.

In a little noticed footnote to a report updating estimates of the effects of the insurance coverage provisions of the law, the agency headed by Douglas Elmendorf acknowledged that neither CBO nor the Joint Committee on Taxation could determine precisely how scores of provisions other than the insurance coverage would impact long term government spending.

“CBO and JCT can no longer determine exactly how the provisions of the ACA that are not related to the expansion of health insurance coverage have affected their projections of direct spending and revenues,” the CBO wrote. “The provisions that expanded coverage established entirely new programs or components of programs that can be isolated and reassessed. Isolating the incremental effects of those provisions on previously existing programs and revenues four years after enactment of the ACP is not possible.”

The footnote was first reported this week by Roll Call and is just now gaining the attention of health care policy experts who question the basis of CBO’s retreat from its earlier forecasting.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/06/05/CBO-Quietly-Drops-Forecast-Obamacare-Will-Cut-Deficit

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