Washington, D.C.–(ENEWSPF)–April 12, 2010. The following remarks are attributable to Douglas Elmendorf, Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
This morning I made a presentation to the World Health Care Congress on the effects of the recently enacted health reform legislation on the federal budget. Everything that I said was drawn from cost estimates and other letters that CBO has released.
I began by reviewing the budget estimates done by CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT):
- In combination, the initial legislation and the subsequent reconciliation act that modified it will generate changes in direct spending and revenue that will reduce federal deficits by $143 billion during the 2010-2019 period.
- The legislation will increase the size of the federal budget by increasing outlays by $411 billion and revenues by $525 billion over the next 10 years (excluding the provisions of the reconciliation act related to education, which will reduce spending by about $19 billion over that period).
- The legislation will increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care (the sum of net federal outlays for health programs and tax preferences for health care) by $390 billion over the next 10 years.
- The legislation will reduce federal deficits during the decade beyond the 10-year budget window relative to those projected under current law—with a total effect in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP.
Then I discussed a number of challenges to those estimates:
- Some observers have asserted that CBO and JCT have misestimated the effects of the changes in law. Concerns have been expressed in different directions—for example, some believe that subsidies will be more expensive than we project, while others maintain that Medicare reforms will save more money than we project.
- Some observers have asserted that budget conventions hide or misrepresent certain effects of the law, such as its impact on future discretionary spending, its effect on the government’s ability to pay Medicare benefits, and its effects on the economy.
- Some observers have asserted that the law will be changed in the future in ways that will make deficits worse.
In addition, some observers believe that, whether CBO and JCT’s estimates of the effects of the health reform legislation are accurate or not, the law misses critical opportunities to reduce future deficits. For example, some say that the legislation will hamper future deficit reduction by using spending cuts and extra revenues to pay for a new entitlement rather than existing entitlements, or that the legislation should have reformed health care delivery more significantly.
Of course, CBO does not make policy judgments or recommendations. However, we have frequently noted the long-run unsustainability of the nation’s current budgetary policies and indicated that using savings in existing programs to finance new programs would necessitate even stronger policy actions in other areas. In December 2008, CBO released a report that included a wide range of options for changes in health policy, and in 2009, we published a volume presenting a variety of options for policy changes in other areas.
Source: cbo.gov