Setting the Record Straight on Health Care Law and the Deficit
In case you hadn’t seen it, Sen. Crapo’s office earlier this afternoon sent out a release regarding spurious claims Democrats and their allies have made in recent days regarding the health care law’s impact on the deficit. Specifically, the White House and others have claimed that a letter from CBO to Sen. Crapo last week regarding the $455 billion cost of repealing “certain provisions” in the health care law is equivalent to the cost of repealing the entire law itself. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, as the press release indicates, Sen. Crapo did NOT request an estimate for the full repeal of the legislation – rather, the CBO’s estimate relates to the cost of repealing only the Medicare savings provisions. Sen. Crapo requested this estimate from CBO because the Medicare actuary, both in the annual Medicare trustees report earlier this month and a separate analysis of the health care law, believe that most of the major Medicare reductions are not sustainable. For instance, the Medicare actuary asserted that under the law’s provisions “Medicare beneficiaries would almost certainly face increasingly severe problems with access to care,” and that providers “would have to withdraw from providing services to Medicare beneficiaries. Likewise, the CBO itself concluded in its long-term budget outlook last month that most of the health law’s major savings provisions are “widely expected” NOT to occur, and if they were implemented, “might be difficult to sustain for a long period.” However, as Sen. Crapo’s letter revealed, if these unrealistic provisions were overridden by Congress, the result would be a significant net increase in the budget deficit.
So while Democrats are attempting to use the CBO letter to make the false claims that repealing the health care law would cost $455 billion, the REAL story is the fact that the claims that the health care law will reduce the deficit in the first place are based on projections that virtually all independent experts believe will never take place – a budgetary gimmick if ever there were one.