Obama-Care Architect To Oversee Its CBO AnalysisJuly 24th, 2012
From the Daily Caller:
Obamacare architects preside over forthcoming CBO cost analysisBy Betsi Fores | Monday, July 23, 2012
As the Congressional Budget Office prepares to release its cost analysis report on the Affordable Care Act, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned that the woman charged with scoring Obamacare has strong ties to the White House as well as the president’s signature legislation.
The Daily Caller previously reported that Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin was formerly a Department of Health and Human Services official under the Obama administration, and that she had personally donated more than $26,000 to Democratic politicians and campaign committees, with $2,300 of that going to President Obama in 2008.
Also in 2008, Buntin was cited as an “Obama Spokeswoman,” when she delivered a speech to health industry insiders to “learn more about the Obama/Biden health care plan.” The speech stressed the cost effectiveness of passing the then-candidates’ plan, which would pay for the “$50 – $65 billion health care reform effort by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for Americans earning more than $250,000 per year and retaining the estate tax at its 2009 level.”
Later, between the years 2009 and 2010, the White House visitors log shows Buntin visited eight times, with one of those occasions being with Vice President Joe Biden.
Buntin, now the deputy assistant director of the CBO’s Health Services Department, came to the post in the middle of 2011.
So Ms. Buntin has had a hand in the CBO’s cost estimates regarding Obama-Care for more than a year.
Employees “are prohibited from participating in partisan political activity if such participation would identify or appear to identify CBO with a candidate, campaign, or cause,” the CBO told TheDC News Foundation in an email…
Snort.
Prior to coming to the CBO, Buntin worked in the Department of Health and Human Services to implement Obamacare-related information technologies and record-keeping procedures at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. As the office’s director of economic analysis and modeling, Buntin provided the Obama administration with statistics showing how best to implement a nationwide system of electronic health records.
Bunton [sic] earned her Ph.D. in health policy at Harvard University while David Cutler, a top Obama adviser, CBO adviser and health economist, was an economics professor in the Department of Economics and the Kennedy School of Government.
Together, the two crafted a health care policy paper for the progressive Center for American Progress think tank in 2009, immediately prior to Obamacare’s passage. The paper, titled “The Two Trillion Dollar Solution: Saving Money by Modernizing Health Care,” suggested a health care reform system almost identical to the legislation that passed months later.
The policy made a “best guess” that cost-cutting measures would reduce government spending by upwards of $200 billion over ten years.
In their paper, Buntin and Cutler predicted that their health care system would create $1.5 trillion in federal government savings over the next decade…
None of which is even close to the CBO’s latest cost projections, which now say Obama-Care will cost at least $1.76 trillion over the next ten years.
And yet this is the same woman who is going to be in charge of the CBO’s up-coming ‘scoring’ of the cost of Obama-Care. How could it possible be wrong? |
