CBO Score Released

[Minimalist]

combined death toll of Union and Confederate soldiers in Civil War.

The population is much larger now.

[vorlon13]

And our collective stomach for such avoidable death and misery as might accrue under Trumpcare is much smaller.

I could see a subsequent Democrat (or whatever supplants them as a party) president seizing Mara Largo, for instance, and burying the fallen from Trumpcare's excrescence all over the grounds, and right up to the door of the clubhouse.

(go review the founding of Arlington if all that sounds familiar)

[Minimalist]

I don't know about that.  Thanks to the WLB, most of Florida will be underwater.

[The Grand Nudger]

The upside being that I wont be one of those poor people who grew up in a house a few blocks from the water.  I'll be an oceanfront property owner just like the Trumpster!

If that's not trickle down economics I don't know what is.

[vorlon13]

Excellent point made on POTUS (Sirius/XM channel 121), Julie Mason's show as I recall; the CBO score for Trumpcare doesn't tell us anything unless we also have a contemporary CBO score for what happens if Trumpcare is not implemented.

Wonder how much enthusiasm Schumer would have for that, and could we get him to agree to support which ever CBO score has the fewer fatalities before the CBO announces the results ??

[Minimalist]

The CBO can only score legislation presented to it.  That's what it does.

They did, however, evaluate the Affordable Care Act and, as Factcheck notes below, they did pretty good.

http://www.factcheck.org/2017/03/cbos-ob...-accurate/

So, was the Congressional Budget Office really “way, way off … in every aspect” of how it predicted that Obamacare would work, as the White House claims? No, it wasn’t.

The CBO actually nailed the overall impact of the law on the uninsured pretty closely. It predicted a big drop in the percentage of people under age 65 who would lack insurance, and that turned out to be the case. CBO projected that in 2016 that nonelderly rate would fall to 11 percent, and the latest figure put the actual rate at 10.3 percent.

It’s true (as Trump administration officials have repeatedly pointed out) that CBO greatly overestimated the number who would get government-subsidized coverage through the new insurance exchanges. But at the same time, CBO underestimated the number who would get coverage through expanding Medicaid.

And whatever the failings of CBO’s predictions, they were closer to the mark than those of the Obama administration and some other prominent forecasters.

Their accuracy there does not bode well for the Republicunts' WeDon'tCare legislation.

[vorlon13]

If doing nothing is worse than adopting Trumpcare, I think we deserve and need to know.

[SteelCurtain]

It depends on what you mean by doing nothing.

If "doing nothing" means actively ignoring easy legislative fixes that could improve the exchanges, lower costs, and remove bureaucratic waste, then doing nothing might make things worse.

But it's hard to imagine even that being worse than gutting Medicare/Medicaid.

[vorlon13]

Since 'easy legislative fixes' are impossible since Martha Coakley fucked her bid for Ted Kennedy's seat, then there aren't any 'easy legislative fixes'. So we're back toevaluating what's the lowest death toll from what's on the table.