Won't That Drive Up CBO's Scoring?
According to this Politico article, Democrats are pushing that more of the 'benefits' of their health care system be delivered in 2010, assuming that it passes by then. The reason why the Senate Finance Committee legislation passed CBO muster is because it counted 10 years of tax increases but only delivered 5 years of coverage.
Couple that with the fact that the Doctor Bribe will have to be included in the Senate's legislation at a cost of $247,000,000,000 and you've got legislation with massive deficits easily in the hundreds of billions dollars range. That's before counting the actual cost of the bill. Right now, the Senate Finance bill is the cheapest at 'only' $829,000,000,000 before the Doctor Bribe.
Democrats are pushing Senate leaders and the White House to speed up key benefits in the health reform bill to 2010, eager to give the party something to show taxpayers for their $900 billion investment in an election year.
The most significant changes to the health care system wouldn't kick in until 2013, two election cycles away. With Republicans expected to make next year a referendum on health care reform, Democrats are quietly lobbying to push up the effective dates on popular programs, so they'll have something to run on in the congressional midterm elections.
I wrote here that the CBO's scoring is vital to final passage. If CBO says health care reform is both expensive and adds new deficits to the projected budget deficits, Democrats like Lincoln, Pryor, Bayh, Landrieu, Lieberman and Ben Nelson will vote against it in the interest of self-preservation.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said the strategy was a transparent attempt to paper over the less palatable aspects of the bill. There are billions in new taxes on insurers, device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies that come due in 2010.
This is fixing to be a Democrat's worst nightmare. People are tired of hearing about the next spending thing that adds hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit. They're exhausted to hear about another round of tax hikes that will hurt the middle class and small businesses. The simple fact is that they're skeptical that government can run something as complex as health care efficiently.
This afternoon, Harry Reid announced that the Senate bill will have a public option, then admitted that they don't have the votes for invoking cloture. That's likely because he can't get people like Mary Landrieu, Evan Bayh and Ben Nelson to sign off on the public option.
Reid, Sen. Schumer and Pelosi are sounding confident but I suspect that they're acting confident rather than being confident in the hopes that they win over a wobbly or two. It's all about exuding an air of inevatibility. It isn't about true confidence.
Comments welcome at LFR.
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