As I noted yesterday, Democratic aides were ecstatic about a key CBO finding: “CBO expects that the legislation, if enacted, would reduce federal budget deficits over the ensuing decade relative to those projected under current law–with a total effect during that decade that is in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP.”
This, they claimed, implied that the health care bill could reduce deficits by as much as $1.3 trillion from 2020-2029–double the first draft of the Reid bill, which, based on a different CBO analysis, leadership aides claimed would reduce the deficit by as much as $650 billion.
Well, they may have to backtrack now.
“CBO has discovered an error in the cost estimate released yesterday related to the longer-term budgetary effects of the manager’s amendment to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” reads a new blog post by CBO chief Doug Elmendorf. “All told, CBO expects that the legislation, if enacted, would reduce federal budget deficits over the decade after 2019 relative to those projected under current law–with a total effect during that decade that is in a broad range between one-quarter percent and one-half percent of GDP.”
All of these long-term budget projections are subject to an extremely high degree of uncertainty–which is why the CBO doesn’t project numbers themselves. In other words, Dems may have gotten a weeeee bit ahead of themselves.
