Everybody can easily remember how the House rushed through their AHCA vote to give Der Gropinfuror his empty legislative victory. The Democrats howled to every moon they could find about the insanity of the GOP voting on a bill that didn’t even have a score from the Congressional Budget Office yet. Guess what? They still don’t.
But what happened to all of the rush? Right now the Senate couldn’t begin to debate the House AHCA bill even if they wanted to (which they don’t) because the House , in the person of Kevin (Putin in paying Trump) McCarthy hasn’t bothered to officially forward the bill up to them. Why? Because they don’t have the CBO score for the bill yet.
It turns out that the pesky little CBO score is important for a completely different reason than everybody thought. All of the Sturm und Drang over the CBO score was to find out how many more than the already scored 24 million people from the original failed bill would become medically challenged, coverage wise due to the latest diabolical GOP machinations. This is the “human need” reason to hate the AHCA bill, and every bit of hatred will be well earned. But it’s the secret sauce in the CBO score that could be trouble for the House GOP.
Remember, the whole choreography of this legislative Kabuki Dance is for the House to pass a really shitty bill, then for the Senate to pass a most likely shitty bill of their own, and then use “budget reconciliation” to make a really really shitty bill that the Democrats in the Senate can’t filibuster. But in order to do that, both of the proposed bills must either save money in the budget, or at the very worst be “revenue neutral”, meaning at least it won’t cost any more even if it doesn’t save any money.
This is why the CBO score is so critical. Depending on exactly how the CBO builds this legislative Dagwood sandwich of cuts and expenditures will determine whether or not the House’s AHCA bill, as passed, is eligible for the budget reconciliation process or not. And if it doesn’t qualify, considering all of the self destructive upheaval the House had to go through just to pass this blivet, good luck with tweaking the numbers to come up better the next time around and getting it to pass again.