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| Pretty sure this is not the CBO that NYT or WAPO were referring to... |
Via Yid With Lid:
The WAPO analysis, pointed out that it is just an estimate and no one really knows for sure how the bills costs will really shake out and his particular estimate is more shaky than usual.
Budget experts generally have high praise for the work of CBO analysts, the non-ideological technocrats who crunch the numbers to estimate the fiscal impact of legislation. But their work is often more art than science, and although the forecasts that accompany legislation are always filled with uncertainty, this one contains more than most.
For example, the legislation contains subsidies for those who would not be able to afford health coverage on their own — but the cost of those subsidies could vary a lot depending on how much other elements of the legislation change the price of health insurance, such as through provisions requiring minimum coverage levels.
The New York Times goes even further, pointing out that there was no way the CBO report was going to show numbers that did not work out in favor of Obamacare:
Congressional Democrats have spent more than a year working with the nonpartisan budget office on the health care legislation, and as they fine-tuned many of the bill’s various provisions in recent weeks, they consulted repeatedly with its number-crunchers and the bipartisan staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation. In other words, the overall numbers were never going to miss the mark. Whenever the budget office judged that some element or elements of the bill would cause a problem meeting the cost and deficit-reduction targets, Democrats just adjusted the underlying legislation to make sure it would hit their goal.
In other words the bill precise language of the bill was written in a way to make the numbers look good, whether they actually do or not is another story all together.
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