Monday, March 13, 2017

UPDATED: CBO Report GOP Replacement Plan: “Duck, Dodge, Deny, Deceive, then Hide”

CBO report on our Bill: “Fake News – Bogus – Joke”
(Last laugh is on you Ryan)

This is Mine, Ours, Take it or Leave It
(Think we'll leave it)

Memo for Ryan and GOP from Expert
(He is never sick and never catches anything)
(Except for that one bad eye)



Updated (March 14, 2017): The original post follows this update. This from The Hill:

“The White House now trying to walk back and still blast the CBO health care replacement plan numbers with their own numbers which are BTW worse thatn CBO's.” 

Now ironic is that... (big smile).

This W/H internal analysis of their own replacement plan projects more insurance losses than the just-released official CBO report (document obtained by Politico). 

The W/H numbers project some 26 million people would lose coverage over the next decade, and a total of 54 million uninsured by 2026 and not the 14 and 24 million the CBO estimate shows.

Under either of those estimates, the uninsured falls by 2026 greatly due to the proposed cuts and dropping people from Medicaid (care for the poor, low-income and disabled). All the while the top bracket and big businesses get huge tax credits.

Seven million fewer people would be insured through their employers over that same time frame because some people would choose not to get coverage and some employers would decline to offer it.

Interesting Note: After the COB report came out, HHS Secy and former GA Rep. Tom Price said “We disagree strenuously with the CBO report just put out, adding is virtually impossible to have 14 million people lose coverage in 2018.” 

NOW PRICE IS A SILENT AS A CHURCH MOUSE – OR IN THIS CASE – A GUTTER RAT.

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ORIGINAL POST FROM HERE: 

The long-awaited CBO (Congressional Budget Office) report (28 pages in .pdf) on the new GOP bill AHCA (American Health Care Act) is out and the GOP is having kittens.
It estimates that 14 million people would be without health insurance in 2018 versus under the plan. 
Some 24 million people would be uninsured in 2026 than under the current plan. 
The report also said that while the AHCA would substantially decrease premiums for younger policy holders, it would substantially raise them for older Americans.
The report is bad news for Republicans who had been preemptively attacking the office in anticipation of a scoring critical of their proposed Obamacare replacement plan.
The CBO was created in 1974 with the mission to be a nonpartisan analyst of proposed legislation, providing independent reports on the potential economic impact of new bills. The current CBO director is Keith Hall, who was appointed in 2015. Hall served on President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, and saw his selection rankle some Democrats due to a 2013 op-ed in which he criticized Obamacare and proposals to raise the minimum wage. The CBO has strict rules to limit financial conflicts of interest and political activities by its employees.
The CBO report echoes the Brookings Institute’s findings which projected that at least 15 million people would lose coverage. This is in stark contrast to President Trump’s campaign promises wherein he said: “I am going to take care of everybody (Sep 2015 interview with “60 Minutes) I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”
White House press secretary Sean Spicer in anticipation of an unflattering CBO report said in advance of the report: “If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place.”
Then Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on “Face the Nation” recently also preemptively dismissed the CBO’s conclusions, saying in part: “The one thing I’m certain will happen is CBO will say, well, gosh, not as many people will get coverage. You know why? Because this isn’t a government mandate. This is not the government makes you buy what we say you should buy, and therefore the government thinks you’re all going to buy it. So there’s no way we can — you can compete with on paper a government mandate with coverage.”
Then when he was pressed on how many people would lose coverage, Ryan said: “I can’t answer that question. It’s up to people.”
Then old Mr. Gloom and Doom himself: White House budget director Mick Mulvaney made his rounds of the Sunday shows, attacking the CBO on ABC News this way: “If the CBO was right about Obamacare to begin with, there would be eight million more people on Obamacare today than there actually are. So I love the folks at the CBO — they work really hard, they do, but sometimes we ask them to do stuff they’re not capable of doing, and estimating the impact of a bill of this size probably isn’t the best use of their time.”
NOTE INSERT: The CBO projections for coverage under the ACA (Obamacare) were inaccurate in part because 19 states opted out of expanded Medicaid — which could not have been predicted at the time — and because they also predicted that more employers would drop their own health insurance plans than actually did. 
While CBO wasn’t perfect in its Obamacare scoring, it wasn’t too far off the mark.
For example, after the Supreme Court ruled that Medicaid expansion was optional for states, the office predicted that 89% of Americans below age 65 would have insurance in 2016. In essence, and according to data from the CDC that number turned out to be 89.7 percent. (The GOP silence was and remains deafening).

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who ran the CBO under President George W. Bush and worked on Mitt Romney’s 2008 campaign, dismissed the criticisms, saying: “The office is genuinely nonpartisan and seeks to make sure its estimates are grounded in research literature. Both Republicans and Democrats have led the office, and the work is always of the same high quality.”
Here is the GOP playbook talking points:
1.  If it’s a DEM project or plan or bill, then hammer it as bad and ours as good.
2.  If a DEM says something, dismiss and insert our view.
3.  Remember: DEMS are bad, dangerous and not good for the country, Republicans are not.
4.  Finally, anything with Obama attached, get rid of it, dismiss it, and ignore it at all costs.
5.  Anything with the GOP label, sell it like there’s no tomorrow.

(My Note: There may not be a tomorrow for those losing healthcare. Just ask those “saved” more or less under the ACA. The GOP has hated the ACA since 2010 – and now fixing it by destroying it and blaming the DEMS – sound familiar).
Reminds me of Vietnam:We had to destroy the village to save it.”

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