Year: 2009

This is more of that Far-Left Liberal Politics at work:

Via CNN:

The White House has criticized the Congressional Budget Office’s findings that the Obama administration’s proposal to control Medicare costs would yield a moderate savings of $2 billion over the next decade.

White House Budget Director Peter Orszag said the CBO’s analysis — which it relayed to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Saturday — could feed a perception of the office’s bias toward “exaggerating costs and underestimating savings.”

“The point of the proposal … was never to generate savings over the next decade,” Orszag said in a letter posted on Saturday.

“Instead the goal is to provide a mechanism for improving quality of care for beneficiaries and reducing costs over the long term.”

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf’s letter to Hoyer on Saturday was in response to the Senate Majority Leader’s request for analysis on “possible approaches for giving the President broad authority to make changes in the Medicare program,” Elmendorf wrote.

The Obama administration is touting a proposal to give a medical advisory council the power to help decide the scope of coverage that would be eligible for reimbursement under Medicare.

Administration officials say the proposed “Independent Medicare Advisory Council” would both improve health care quality and control costs. Some health care industry groups object to the proposal, saying such a council would not be qualified to make those judgments.

The CBO’s review of the proposal found that “the probability is high that no savings would be realized … but there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized,” Elmendorf wrote.

“Looking beyond the 10-year-budget window, CBO expects that this proposal would generate larger but still modest savings on the same probabilistic basis.”

Orszag, a former director of the CBO, pointed out that “it is very rare for CBO to conclude that a specific legislative proposal would generate significant long-term savings so it is noteworthy that, with some modifications, CBO reached such a conclusion with regard to the IMAC (Independent Medicare Advisory Council concept.”

But he also criticized Elmendorf’s findings.

“As a former CBO director, I can attest that CBO is sometimes accused of a bias toward exaggerating costs and underestimating savings. Unfortunately, parts of today’s analysis from CBO could feed that perception,” Orszag said.

“In providing a quantitative estimate of long-term effects without any analytical basis for doing so, CBO seems to have overstepped.”

Just another attack from a worried White House, who wants their agenda passed, no matter the cost to the people or to our Nation.

Some Reactions from the Conservative Blogosphere:

Keith Hennessey:

With this letter CBO has killed the President’s IMAC proposal.  It almost certainly would have died even without CBO’s letter.  The proposal would have transferred an enormous amount of power from Congress to the Executive Branch.  Turf-conscious Congressional committee chairmen would have fought it to protect their power base.  Medicare provider interest groups (hospitals, doctors) were starting to lobby against it.  They prefer Congress making these decisions because they’re easier to lobby and influence.

The only chance IMAC had was if CBO had said it would save gobs of money, allowing House leaders simultaneously to make Blue Dogs happy for being fiscally responsible, and to remove from their bill other, more politically painful, spending cuts or tax increases.  IMAC was drafted so weakly that it became a budget gimmick.

[….]

Yes, the Administration could submit a fundamentally different proposal and call it a “tweak” of their existing one.  To achieve the stated goals of bending the government health cost curve down and reducing future deficits, such a proposal would need to actually cut spending in an enforcable and unavoidable way.  If they want to throw in a new council to shuffle money around within the mandated lower levels, that’s a separable question.  The President’s advisors know, however, that a proposal like this with real teeth would never get off the ground in Congress.  That’s too bad, because we desperately need the long-term deficit reduction.

The death of IMAC is a black eye for the Administration and another step backward for the pending health care reform bills.  This result was both predictable and avoidable.

Ed Morrissey:

In a Hot Air exclusive, I contacted Chuck Blahous of the Hudson Institute, formerly the deputy director of George Bush’s National Economic Council about the open and aggressive attack on the CBO from Orszag and the White House.  Blahous finds it unseemly:

“It’s routine for OMB and CBO to have scoring differences. It’s also routine for the two agencies to separately acknowledge, explain and quantify them. What’s not routine is for each to overtly criticize the other. This is a bad road to go down in any case, but even more so because OMB probably has the glass house here. Institutionally, they’re just different; CBO is purely a referee, while OMB is part referee, part player because they’re part of the President’s policy development team. Moreover, OMB’s February budget presentation attracted a lot of justified criticism for its economic assumptions and for moving various deficit-expanding policies into the budget baseline. Furthermore, most of the claims about long-term cost savings from health care reform have been purely speculative, with no data from the actuaries to back them up. Still, I don’t expect CBO to hit back and to criticize OMB scoring, nor should they. Hopefully folks will walk back and cooler heads will prevail.”

Orszag has been an embarrassment as OMB director, and now he’s becoming dangerous to the separation of powers between the branches of government. Either Obama should put Orszag on a leash, or get rid of him immediately — and find a real budget director, not just a liberal-agenda hack.

Steve Gilbert over at Sweetness and Light:

It’s hard to puzzle it out from this article, but this is an extension of Obama’s efforts to wrest control of Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements away from Congress so that he can call the shots.

And, despite what Mr. Orszag now claims, that was and is touted as a way to bring about tremendous savings.

Congress asked the CBO’s opinion, since they want to keep this power for themselves.

Needless to say, it should be nigh unto impossible for the CBO to predict whether the Obama people would raise or lower the reimbursement levels.

So naturally they tried to have it both ways:

[….]

And still the White House slammed them.

William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:

What a pathetic joke the Democratic legislative effort has become. Loss of freedom and no meaningful cost savings. The opposite of “you get what you pay for.”

As Rahm Emanuel and Henry Waxman push to have a vote next week, it is clear that neither the Congress nor the White House has any clue as to the consequences of what they are proposing (if they even have read it). All the more reason we need to see the bill, debate it, and let our representatives know how we feel before they vote.

So give double thanks this weekend. First, for the CBO not giving in to political pressure. And second, for the fact that the CBO works on Saturdays.

I cannot say that I honestly disagree with that. This whole thing is a page right out of Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals. It also could be a page out of the old Clinton playbook as well. What you cannot change or control; you contain it by discrediting it. If you cannot do that, then kill it. Just ask Vice Foster‘s family about that. Come to think of it, there are quite a few families that could be asked about that.  Conspiracy theories?  You decide.

Hope! Change! Intimadation! Discrediting of your Enemies! All just another day in the Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.