Republican Senator Mike Enzi is apparently the designated hit-man on the Senate HELP committee's health care reform efforts, issuing a statement that trumpets the Congressional Budget Office's preliminary number crunching on the HELP bill's first draft, of course giving no indication whatsoever that the CBO was scoring an incomplete bill. That despite the fact that the CBO indicated as much, as pointed out by Media Matters:
The CBO is perfectly
clear on the status of the analysis:
"It is important to note, however, that those figures do not represent a formal or complete cost estimate for the draft legislation...Moreover, because expanded eligibility for the Medicaid program may be added at a later date, those figures are not likely to represent the impact that more comprehensive proposals...would have both on the federal budget and on the extent of insurance coverage."
The bill is not complete. The language to construct a public option is missing. The portion calling for an individual or employer mandate is still being formed. The Finance Committee has yet to draft a plan for changing Medicaid.
Ezra has more:
A couple of months ago, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee sent the CBO a sketch of a draft of its legislation. And the CBO sent the members back a stab at an outline of an estimate. It was all very early, and very rough. But the draft that the HELP Committee sent CBO had a couple things that this bill didn't have. In particular, it had a robust employer mandate and a robust individual mandate.
CBO's response was encouraging. The total cost was a bit higher, but the number covered was much higher. More like what you'd expect. More like what health reform is trying to achieve.
The bill the CBO examined this time was missing these policies. In an effort to buy some extra time to negotiate with Republicans on the committee, the Democrats on HELP left out some of the key points of controversy in the hopes of reaching more bipartisan agreement sometime this week....
The HELP Committee's expectation was that the CBO, in crafting its preliminary estimates, would assume something similar to the outline it had seen months before. The CBO didn't. In fact, it did the opposite. CBO ran its estimates with no employer mandate and an individual mandate with a laughably small penalty.
So what has this got to do with bipartisanship? Republicans were pushing for the new CBO scoring, and Democrats acquiesced.
The CBO's findings . . . are for an incomplete piece of legislation, making the cost-per-coverage estimates much worse than they will ultimately be. Republicans on the committee knew this, according to Democrats. But they pushed for the bill to be studied by the CBO now. And when poor results came back, they ran with them.
"The reality is there are still some outstanding issues, including employer responsibility and a public insurance option," said a Democratic aide to a committee member. "Those are two outstanding issues. So what we did in a good faith effort to find bipartisan consensus, we did not include those elements because we are trying to find common ground. But Republicans wanted there to be a score even though, the reality is, if there is an incomplete bill you will have an incomplete statement."
Another Democratic aide to the HELP Committee member concurred, adding that Sen. Ted Kennedy's office, in an effort to "find bipartisan consensus with Republicans colleagues" filed the bill and allowed it to be scored by the CBO -- not expecting it to be used as partisan fodder.
Senate Democrats have got to understand one fundamental thing: bipartisanship and real health care reform are mutually exclusive. The Republicans are not going to bargain in good faith on this. Period.
