A group of moderate Republicans was pushing this week to include legislation for “stabilizing” Obamacare within a spending bill that funds the government beyond its latest shutdown deadline of Friday night. The lawmakers’ proposal contains new money subject to abortion funding restrictions—a…
If Senate Republicans are going to pass a bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare, it appears they'll need everyone but libertarian Rand Paul and moderate Susan Collins to do it.
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer John McCormack talks with host Eric Felten about Ted Cruz’s efforts to amend the Senate GOP’s floundering (okay, foundering) healthcare legislation.
The ball in Times Square hit zero Wednesday evening for the Congressional Budget Office's latest projection of the American Health Care Act. As with the agency's estimate of an earlier version of the bill, the document was immediately put to political use. "The Congressional Budget Office just…
On Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office released a report projecting that federal budget deficits will more than triple over the next thirty years. That will lead to record levels of debt for the U.S. federal government.
In the hour it was reported with smothering ubiquity that the GOP's Obamacare replacement would cause 24 million individuals to "lose" insurance, the debate about government health care policy was given a bucket of buffalo wings, a wet nap, and a day off. It was about to get sloppy and awfully lazy.
The Congressional Budget Office is finally out with its analysis of the Trump-backed American Health Care Act, and the results are, well, not great, Bob! The big headline, and the big headache for the White House, is the estimate that in less than a decade 24 million fewer people would have…
The Congressional Budget Office on Monday dropped its highly-anticipated analysis of the House Republicans' healthcare plan, arming all sides with results that can back up their favorite talking points on healthcare. The CBO report, on the one hand, says that millions more people will be uninsured…
A budget estimate of the House GOP's health bill has found that millions of Americans insured through Obamacare's exchanges would opt out of purchasing coverage once the federal government stops penalizing them for doing so.
Congressional members and staffers generally act like their fellow Americans sit around waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to release scoring of major legislative proposals, much like they await the release of March Madness brackets. The truth is that most Americans hardly care what the…
Vox interviewed President Obama on Facebook Live Friday. He discussed health care, along with the doomed fate of his health care law. One of the more interesting things he had to say was this:
Given that Obamacare’s supporters like to take the Congressional Budget Office’s overly optimistic scoring of the president’s signature legislation as gospel, it’s fun to look at how poorly Obamacare is actually doing in relation to earlier CBO projections. When the Democrats rammed Obamacare…
On Friday, congressional Republicans appointed Keith Hall to become the next director of the Congressional Budget Office. The announcement ended a careful two-month process that involved figuring out how to fill the position with a competent and credible individual, but without giving Democrats…
Two well-placed sources on Capitol Hill say that the Congressional Budget Office effectively used Jonathan Gruber’s model to score Obamacare. That model favors government mandates over market competition and claims that essentially the only way to achieve a large reduction in the number of…
Jonathan Gruber, a key architect of Obamacare (and also of Romneycare), has been caught on camera by the Daily Signal offering up insights on the “stupidity of the American voter” and on the importance of using a noble lie (or lies) in passing Obamacare.
We have been paying attention to other things so it probably slipped out minds. But as Bernie Becker of the The Hill reports, the defect hasn’t gone away (gone down, some, but not away) and:
In March 2010, Obamacare was about to be voted upon by the House of Representatives, and the Democrats were in the process of deciding whether to ignore public opinion at their peril. At that time, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that Obamacare would cost $938 billion over a decade…
With enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges now closed, Democrats and their friends in the media are ebullient. Obamacare is an enormous success, they say, and conservatives have been humiliated. On closer inspection, however, things seem decidedly less bullish for President Obama’s signature…
The Hill reports:
On February 4 the Congressional Budget Office dropped a bombshell. Analysts there found that Obamacare’s structure will create an enormous implicit tax on work, such that people on the lower end of the economic scale will have an incentive to quit their jobs or scale back to part time to maximize…
New analysis by the minority-side of the Senate Budget Committee finds that Obamacare will reduce compensation by more than $1 trillion between 2017-2024. Analysts in that office have produced this chart to show the lost compensation by year:
The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on why the Obamacare jobs numbers are trouble for Democrats.
Remember back when the Democrats tried to sell Obamacare to a skeptical citizenry as health care “reform” that would cost “only” $848 billion—far less than a trillion—over a decade? Indeed, that was the alleged 10-year gross cost of Obamacare’s coverage provisions, according to the Congressional…
The Congressional Budget Office has come out with a report on the effects of Affordable Care Act on the U.S. economy. As Erik Wasson of The Hill reports, the findings are not pretty.
Every spring the Office of Management and Budget releases the president’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year. While Congress invites senior administration figures to testify before various committees, and the media pore through the document to elucidate the administration’s priorities, by…
Every spring the Office of Management and Budget releases the president’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year. While Congress invites senior administration figures to testify before various committees, and the media pore through the document to elucidate the administration’s priorities, by…
A big part of Obamacare is its massive expansion of Medicaid. Fortunately, this expansion can’t happen in most states without Republicans freely choosing to make it happen. Unfortunately, far too many Republican governors seem to be confused about the distinction between repealing Obamacare and…
On Monday, CNBC reported on a new survey that found that two-thirds of Americans currently without health insurance don't know if they will purchase coverage by the deadline, the first day of 2014. The survey was released by InsuranceQuotes.com, a company that offers comparison shopping for…
President Obama's top strategist, David Axelrod, said today on Fox News Sunday that, under Obama, we've had "29 straight months of job growth." Yet, according to the federal government's own figures, 29 months ago, 58.5 percent of Americans were employed. Today, only 58.4 percent of Americans are…
The Washington Times reports:
In its most dire warning yet about the fiscal cliff yet, the CBO said the economy would contract by 0.5 percent in calendar year 2013 if the Bush-era tax rates expire and automatic spending cuts are implemented. Unemployment also would rise from 8.2 percent in 2012 to 9.1 percent next year, it…
Senior White House advisor David Plouffe — President Obama’s campaign manager in 2008 — told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday that, when it comes to dealing with our colossal deficits and debt, “the right approach is the president’s approach.” That approach, Plouffe added, “gets our deficit on a…
Minnesota Public Radio reports, “A loophole in the federal health care overhaul would allow many employers to game the system by dumping their sicker employees [into] public health insurance exchanges, according to two University of Minnesota law professors.” Such “targeted dumping” of sicker…
The Hill reports that the Congressional Budget Office has scored the Boehner debt ceiling plan as reducing the deficit more than Harry Reid's plan -- and that's without resorting to gimmickry regarding assumptions about war spending:
Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, told the House Budget Committee this morning that his office was unable to estimate the long-term viability of the "budget framework" President Obama outlined in his April 13 budget speech.
The CBO’s newly released 2011 Long-Term Budget Outlook forecasts that federal spending will soon exceed spending during parts of World War II. In 1942, federal spending equaled 24.3 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) (Table 1.3). Less than 25 years from now (in 2035), according to the CBO,…
Ever since President Obama gave his speech on deficit reduction last month, in response to the Paul Ryan-authored 2012 House Republican budget, press accounts have suggested that he has released an actual budget that would reduce deficit spending by $4 trillion. This claim is wrong on both counts:…
In The Week, David Frum claims that House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s proposed budget “actually increases the debt over the medium term — by even more [than] President Obama’s budget would,” thereby “worsening … the debt situation over the period from 2012 to 2021.” In today’s New York…
"How Obama turned on a dime toward war"