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17 Dec 09

CBO said Wednesday that the bill belonging to Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass. and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. would result in $21 billion surplus between of 2010-19. The nonpartisan CBO added that the bill would continue to be in the black even as the cap it creates tightens.

11 Nov 09

08 Nov 09

The claim that the House bill would amount to "government-run health care" suffered a blow last week, when the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the so-called "public plan" in the revised bill wouldn’t offer much in the way of competition to private insurers. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from repeating the claim.

05 Nov 09

CBO says adopting their plan would reduce the deficit by $68 billion over ten years relative to current law. The number for the Democratic bill, however, is $104 billion.
Instead, under the Boehner Plan the number of people without health insurance will stay steady at 17 percent. The Democratic plan will see that sliced to just four percent.
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- “In the large group market, which represents nearly 80 percent of total private premiums, the amendment would lower average insurance premiums in 2016 by zero to 3 percent compared with amounts under current law.”
- And insofar as their plan does reduce premiums, it’s by making your coverage worse:
  
  The second source of change in average insurance premiums is changes in the average extent of coverage purchased. Those changes can reflect both changes in the scope of insurance coverage—the benefits or services that are included—and changes in the share of costs for covered services paid by the insurer—known as the “actuarial value.”
- Provisions in the amendment that would reduce insurance premiums by affecting the amount of coverage purchased include the State Innovations program, which would encourage states to reduce the number and extent of benefit mandates that they impose, and provisions that would allow individuals or affiliated groups to purchase insurance policies in other states that have less stringent mandates.

Earlier this week, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner made a prediction. The Republican health care plan, he said, "will cover millions more Americans" than the Democrats' plan. Bold. But here's what the experts say:
By 2019, CBO and JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people without health insurance would be reduced by about 3 million relative to current law, leaving about 52 million nonelderly residents uninsured. The share of legal nonelderly residents with insurance coverage in 2019 would be about 83 percent, roughly in line with the current share.
the bill didn't include some of the most popular insurance regulations in the Democrats' bill, including a ban on pre-existing condition discrimination.
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- the amendment would lower average insurance premiums in 2016 by zero to 3 percent compared with amounts under current law, according to CBO's estimates. The figures are presented for 2016 as an illustrative example.

28 Oct 09

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academies finds that tiny, perfectly doable steps to reduce energy waste at home—from weatherproofing to power strips that prevent televisions from pigging out on electricity while on "standby" mode—could rapidly reduce annual U.S. carbon emissions by 7.4 percent.
On the less-fuzzy side, however, a recent report from Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm, warns that the House and Senate climate bills under consideration could cause a number of U.S. refiners to shut down, leading to more imported gasoline from overseas (thanks to a loophole in the bills), all while doing relatively little to curb demand for oil products. That's not good, and seems worth addressing in the Senate.
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- The National Research Council just estimated that burning coal and oil imposes at least $120 billion in hidden costs on the United States each year in the form of health impacts from air pollution. And that's only a partial estimate of the full toll: "The figure does not include damages from climate change, harm to ecosystems, effects of some air pollutants such as mercury, and risks to national security." To set this in context, the health-related costs from coal and oil alone are steeper than what the CBO projects the House climate bill would cost the U.S. economy—and that's before taking the dangers of global warming into account.

22 Oct 09

new paper (pdf)
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- From the director's blog:
- Climate policies thus have a strong element of risk management: Depending on the costs of doing so, society may find it economically sensible to invest in reducing the risk of the most severe possible impacts from climate change even if their likelihood is relatively remote.
- At the same time, the uncertainties in the link between emissions and climate change mean that even rigid quantitative targets are not likely to achieve a specific warming target. Uncertainties may thus justify flexible mechanisms even though they may simultaneously justify relatively stringent policies.

12 Oct 09

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate Finance Committee's health care bill "will result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $81 billion between 2010 and 2019 and "reduce the federal budgetary commitment to health care." But the positive score isn't winning converts.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., suggested the Democrats should "start over" on health care reform. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., dismissed the score, declaring, "This partisan Finance Committee proposal will never see the Senate floor."

28 Aug 09

Total spending on health care would rise from 16% of GDP in 2007 to 25% in 2025, 37% in 2050 and 49% in 2082.
Federal spending on Medicare (net of beneficiaries premiums) and Medicaid would rise from 4% of GDP in 2007 to 7% in 2025, 12% in 2050 and 19% in 2082.
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- this chart