If House Democrats hold a vote on their health-care overhaul this weekend, they might as well vote on abolishing the Congressional Budget Office too. It would be no more audacious — and much more honest — than their current strategy for hiding the true cost of their legislation.
Never mind the everyday budget gimmicks House Democrats have used, such as removing $250 billion of deficit spending to be voted on separately. Or claiming their bill would cost just $894 billion — around $400 billion less than the CBO actually projected. We've seen this kind of trickery plenty in recent years; to suppress an inconvenient cost estimate of its proposed Medicare drug entitlement, the Bush administration threatened to fire Medicare's chief actuary.
Deceptions on this scale are child's play, at least when compared to what has to be the biggest fiscal obfuscation in the history of American politics: The current leadership has rigged the legislation so that 60 percent of its total cost will not be made public by the CBO in advance of the House vote. Here's how they did it.
The centerpiece of the bills currently under consideration is not the "public option," but the "individual mandate" — a legal requirement that all U.S. residents purchase health insurance, on penalty of fines and/or imprisonment.
The CBO describes an individual mandate as "an unprecedented form of federal action" whose closest analogue in federal law is the draft. But as President Obama told a joint session of Congress, the rest of the legislation won't work unless the federal government forces Americans to purchase health insurance. READ MORE @ CATO
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