CBO blasts health plan as budget buster
By: Susan Ferrechio
Chief Congressional Correspondent
July 17, 2009
The head of the Congressional Budget Office doused renewed Democratic hopes for a massive health care overhaul, telling the Senate Budget Committee that the plans endorsed by President Barack Obama and others could drive the national debt to unsustainable levels.
Director Douglas Elmendorf said proposals in the House and Senate "would be much more likely to worsen the long-run budget outlook than to improve it."
The analysis, delivered to Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., undercuts the argument from Obama that health care reform will save money by lowering costs. Democratic leaders in Congress, already struggling to come up with enough votes needed within their own party to pass the bill by the August deadline set by the White House, were sent scrambling.
"The health care overhauls released to date would increase, not reduce, the burgeoning long-term health care costs facing the government," Elmendorf told Conrad.
Elmendorf said that under the two bills the House and Senate are considering, both of which subsidize coverage and create a government-run insurance plan, the federal government would take on an enormous financial burden, while realizing smaller savings than Democrats predicted. Elmendorf urged Congress to put the brakes on the Democrats' fast-paced approach and instead make a much slower attempt at health care reform in order to first determine what works.
Republicans, who are almost unanimously opposed to the Democratic bills, seized on Elmendorf's analysis.
"Today's CBO testimony should be a wake-up call," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said. "Instead of rushing through one proposal after another, we should take the time we need to get things right."
Elmendorf said in his letter that one of the best ways to reduce rising health care costs would be to tax health care benefits.
Such a tax was embraced by Conrad and Sen. Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., who are trying to write a bipartisan bill. But they were forced to take the proposal off the table in part because Obama opposes it.
Baucus told reporters Obama is hurting his effort to come up with a way to pay for health care by opposing the benefits tax.
Senate Democratic leaders acknowledged they are now pouring through the Senate rules book, trying to come up with ways to pass the bill with just 51 votes, not the 60 votes typically needed, under a special measure called "budget reconciliation."
"We have people working on what can done and what cannot be done under reconciliation," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said, adding that he was not sure how much of the bill could be passed that way.
In the House, but resistance is building among the House Democratic "Blue Dog" coalition of 52 centrist lawmakers, some of whom are now threatening there is enough resistance to block passage. The House bill would put in place a government-run insurance plan that would pay doctors Medicare rates that critics say could put private insurance out of business.
"I think more competition in the insurance market is a good thing, but they've got to play fair," said Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., a former insurance commissioner who said he is opposed to the House bill. |
