Charles Blahous, a conservative policy analyst and former Bush official who spear-headed the Social Security privatization effort, is
releasing a new study Tuesday that finds the Affordable Care Act will increase the deficit by $340 billion in the next decade.
“Does the health-care act worsen the deficit? The answer, I think, is clearly that it does,” Blahous, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, said in an interview. “If one asserts that this law extends the solvency of Medicare, then one is affirming that this law adds to the deficit. Because the expansion of the Medicare trust fund and the creation of the new subsidies together create more spending than existed under prior law." [...]
Blahous acknowledged that his analysis departs from budget conventions, which, he said, make sense for the most part. He said that in this case, however, those rules do not fully illuminate the financial impact of the health-care law, since they permit what conservative critics have dubbed a “double counting” of proposed Medicare savings.
What the
Washington Post doesn't tell readers, however, is that the Mercatus Center is
funded by Koch industries and that this is much more a political document than an economic one. It's also not a serious policy document, precisely because it "departs from budget conventions."
As Igor Volsky explains, what Blahous calls "double counting" is actually the "unified budget process," the "accounting method that considers the spending and revenues of the entire federal budget over a 10 year period and the way Congress keeps track of its dollars." It's also the method that the Congressional Budget Office uses to evaluate policies, including the Affordable Care Act, which it said in 2010 would reduce the deficit over the next decade by $143 billion. The CBO revised that estimate this week, finding that it would "cost $50 billion less than they anticipated." As for Medicare's solvency, Volksy pointed out that "Medicare actuaries reported that as a result of the savings in the law, the life of Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) Fund is extended to 2024, instead of in 2016."
This is, as the White House says a "new math." Blahous, and other conservatives before him, are trying to superimpose an accounting system that would extend analysis over a much longer, and unrealistic, time frame. It's a new math, by the way, that Republican Congresses have never used.
The Right, funded of course by Koch, is attempting to change the rules in the middle of the game. As usual.