Throughout their attempts to push a poorly thought out health care bill through Congress, Republicans have been trashing the Congressional Budget Office. It’s not hard to figure out why - the CBO has thus far been critical of the American Health Care Act, predicting it would cause 20 to 24 million people to lose their health insurance, depending on the bill version.
Every time this year the CBO has come out with a score, the Republicans came out right after them telling Republican voters that the CBO is untrustworthy and wrong for saying the Republican plan won’t work financially. This time, President Donald Trump has joined the action by tweeting an image that claims the CBO overestimated how many people would use Obamacare by nearly 13 million.
The problem, of course, is that it was an astounding misrepresentation of the facts. First, the CBO was most accurate about how many people would be covered under Obamacare, but the exact numbers it predicted, about how they would gain coverage, were off.
This was almost entirely because the Supreme Court removed the mandatory medicaid expansion portion of the bill. The CBO predicted more than 20 million would gain coverage, which they did. It was inaccurate about how. Trump chose to pluck one portion of one of the most inaccurate numbers to suggest the whole score was off.
It’s not a new strategy. They did the exact same thing in 2010, when the CBO issued a positive statement about what the Affordable Care Act might do. Then, just as now, Republicans began a campaign against the CBO by suggesting it was calculated using gimmickry and tricks.
Of course, then it was more obvious what they were doing. That’s because just months before they criticized the CBO for positively rating Obamacare, they were lauding it as a nonpartisan and totally reliable department for rating their own proposal in a way they felt was positive. Then, their strategy was to convince people the CBO was on their side. However, once people realized the Democrats’ plan was actually smarter and more efficient, the GOP switch strategies and started trying to lambast the CBO by portraying it as a manipulative, secretive partisan organization dedicated to providing false numbers like a game on PlayNJ, to bolster a particular agenda.
It’s not that. Republicans probably know it’s not that, too. The CBO, a department entirely separate from the politics of congress, is in fact one of the most unbiased departments in the government, with a stellar reputation for reporting facts exactly as they are known. They have a strong track record of ruining both Democrats and Republicans’ lofty ambitions, and they’ve consistently been the most accurate predictor of financial outcomes of any organization that’s tried.
The only reason Republicans are claiming it has a slant is because it’s suggested a couple times now that the Republicans’ healthcare plan is going to be worse for the country. Republicans have never once, and never will, admit that this might be because their plan is worse for the country. Instead, they will continue to try to put blame on the CBO, on Democrats, on the media, on anyone who isn’t willing to pretend that their disaster of a plan is anything but that.