Obamacare advocates in the White House, Congress and the newsroom of the New York Times were elated this week when a Congressional Budget Office statement said the health care reform bill by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., would cut the federal deficit by $81 billion annually. Hallelujahs ensued all around, including a Times headline proclaiming “Health care bill gets green light in cost analysis.” But two words in the CBO statement — “Preliminary Analysis” — demonstrate that such celebrations were not only premature, but fundamentally misleading.

CBO had to qualify its observations because it was not allowed to score the actual text of the Baucus bill but rather had to rely on a legislative summary provided by Senate committee staff. So not only were CBO’s analysts forced to look at language that put the bill in the best possible light, they were also denied the concrete details and precise legal wording that quite possibly could change their conclusions entirely. Such “close enough for government work” analyses suffice for Baucus and the Times, but for everybody else, by labeling its assessment as preliminary, CBO was clearly waving yellow caution flags.