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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (36111)	8/2/2009 11:56:52 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Yeah, they (CBO) are not allowed to use "dynamic scoring" (like Bush was so fond of, and Gingrich, et al). The case for dynamic scoring of tax cuts reducing the tax intake (or tax increases increasing the tax intake) less then a simple static calculation would suggest is FAR more solid than a case for dynamic scoring of health care reform as something that reduces costs or something that increases government spending less than static scoring would suggest. There is no really solid basis for believing that reform will lower cost in "dynamic" ways. It could allocate less to certain government programs directly but that would be a change that would be covered by static scoring. Dynamic scoring is scoring considering the incentives that are created and how people will react to them. We have plenty of real world history with that with taxes; but with the types of policies being pushed as health care reform we simply don't have the type of information and understanding that we would need for any realistic dynamic scoring. Also the CBO is a better source of projections for things like government budgets than it is a source for projections about the the dynamic reactions of private sector markets in health care and health insurance to different conditions or policies. CBO boosts Obama's health care plan Says proviso 'won't kill private insurers' What it really says is that given certain assumptions (and we have no solid reason to accept those specific assumptions), that only about 12 million people would opt for the public plan, during the time frame the CBO's analysis covers. Even if you accept that idea (and we really don't have a solid reason to do so) 100%, than it still doesn't amount to "won't kill private insurers" in the long term. Actually unless private insurance is outlawed or regulated to a ridiculous degree it probably will remain. Possibly with low cost "catastrophic coverage" plans (assuming that the government doesn't over a subsidized version, or pass regulations for minimum coverage which outlaws such plans), or possibly by "Obama care gap" insurance like the current "Medigap plans". As for Krugman's article. There is no guarantee that the current system will double costs over 10 years. More importantly there isn't even remotely close to being any guarantee that the ideas Krugman supports, or the ideas that come out of congress as a law won't increase costs even faster (or increase costs as much or almost as much with worse results). He falls in to the fallacy of "something is a problem, so we must support change", despite the fact that generally most possible changes are bad, so the current situation being suboptimal is not something that implies that we should support any specific proposed changes.