The right-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial board said congressional Republicans shouldn’t be discouraged by the less-than-favorable Congressional Budget Office estimate of the new healthcare bill.
The CBO released its estimate Monday and it said that while the bill could save the government more than $300 billion, it would leave 24 million Americans uninsured, mostly because the legislation contains no mandate to buy insurance, as the current law does.
Despite the bill potentially covering fewer people, the Journal said in a Monday night editorial that the CBO’s estimate should be viewed only as one opinion in the GOP’s deliberation.
“CBO models are not a writ carved in stone by a finger of light, but merely an educated economic guess about how consumers and businesses will behave differently in response to new health-care policies,” the Journal said. “Thus this cost estimate should be part of the larger debate, not taken as gospel.”
The paper said the CBO didn’t take into account the possibility that markets will react more favorably to increased competition among insurance providers, which the bill aims to do, and the Journal also pointed to the CBO’s inaccurate estimates about the current healthcare law’s individual exchange enrollment.
“The smarter approach is to take CBO as merely one opinion about the future and point to others that are equally credible, and explain why,” the editorial said. “Above all, the GOP shouldn’t let budget scorekeepers dictate political judgments.”
Democrats and the national media have pounced on the CBO’s findings as evidence that the GOP’s healthcare bill will fail to cover as many as Obamacare.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, however, has said he’s “encouraged” by the CBO’s estimate.
But Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said that he and the White House “strenuously disagree” with the estimate, stating that the CBO didn’t take into account administration procedures he can take to compensate for any of the bill’s shortcomings.
