Little-Acorn
12-24-2009, 06:22 PM
For that matter, does ANYTHING the Democrats have promised us about the present Health Care bill matter, if they are just going to throw it out and put in something else later?
A number of Democrat congressmen have been quoted recently as saying that the present Health Care bills are "just a start", "just a first step", etc. Meaning, they intend to add things later, alter what's in the bill, expand government involvement far more than these bills say, and all the rest.
Will we hear from the CBO how much the bill will cost us after these alterations are put in place? Or will the present bill be voted on, passed, and signed into law long before any such evaluations are done?
I think we can guess WHY the Democrats don't want to reveal what their government health-care takeover will really look like a year from now, or five or ten.
In fact, it's not hard to guess why they wanted to ram even the present plan through BEFORE the Senators went home for Christmas break to be confronted by their voters.
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http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/the_process_of_passing_health.php
from "The Process of Passing Health Care"
by Megan McArdle
22 Dec 2009 10:35 am
I am beginning to believe that in order to get this bill passed, the Democrats basically gutted the CBO. Not because they were working with the CBO to get estimates--that's the CBO's job, to provide Congress with a cost. But rather, because this bill was something novel in the history of legislation.
Previous Congresses wrote bills, and then trimmed them to get a better CBO score: witness the Bush tax cut sunsets. But the Congressional Democrats started out with a CBO score they wanted, and worked backward to the bill. They've been pretty explicit about the fact that no one wants this actual bill; rather, the plan is to pass basically anything, and then go and totally rewrite it when the budget spotlight is off. I'm not aware of any other piece of legislation that was passed this way.
Essentially, the Democrats have finished the process of gaming the CBO scores. They're now meaningless. You don't pass a piece of legislation that bears any resemblance to what you intend to end up with; you pass a piece of legislation that gets a good CBO score, and then go and alter it piece by piece.
This is obviously troubling because major bills will no longer have any meaningful deficit control--minor bills will presumably be done the old fashioned way, where congressmen have an actual passing interest in cost-benefit analysis.
But it's also troubling because Democrats aren't going to go back and modify the bill into something good, the way that many of them are currently imagining. The bill will be modified, piece by piece, according to the same crappy process that produced the current monstrosity: horse trading, log rolling, and all. (Yes, even if you use the magic of budget reconciliation, which still offers lavish opportunities for pork and stupidity).
Some of the things you think you are going to get, you won't; they may very well be the crucial parts that make everything else work as you actually plan. At every step, the bill is probably more likely to get worse than to get better. At any rate, passing a bill based on either a meaningless CBO score, or the notion that it can be rewritten to spec at some later date, is not a process for generating good legislation.
A number of Democrat congressmen have been quoted recently as saying that the present Health Care bills are "just a start", "just a first step", etc. Meaning, they intend to add things later, alter what's in the bill, expand government involvement far more than these bills say, and all the rest.
Will we hear from the CBO how much the bill will cost us after these alterations are put in place? Or will the present bill be voted on, passed, and signed into law long before any such evaluations are done?
I think we can guess WHY the Democrats don't want to reveal what their government health-care takeover will really look like a year from now, or five or ten.
In fact, it's not hard to guess why they wanted to ram even the present plan through BEFORE the Senators went home for Christmas break to be confronted by their voters.
----------------------------------
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/the_process_of_passing_health.php
from "The Process of Passing Health Care"
by Megan McArdle
22 Dec 2009 10:35 am
I am beginning to believe that in order to get this bill passed, the Democrats basically gutted the CBO. Not because they were working with the CBO to get estimates--that's the CBO's job, to provide Congress with a cost. But rather, because this bill was something novel in the history of legislation.
Previous Congresses wrote bills, and then trimmed them to get a better CBO score: witness the Bush tax cut sunsets. But the Congressional Democrats started out with a CBO score they wanted, and worked backward to the bill. They've been pretty explicit about the fact that no one wants this actual bill; rather, the plan is to pass basically anything, and then go and totally rewrite it when the budget spotlight is off. I'm not aware of any other piece of legislation that was passed this way.
Essentially, the Democrats have finished the process of gaming the CBO scores. They're now meaningless. You don't pass a piece of legislation that bears any resemblance to what you intend to end up with; you pass a piece of legislation that gets a good CBO score, and then go and alter it piece by piece.
This is obviously troubling because major bills will no longer have any meaningful deficit control--minor bills will presumably be done the old fashioned way, where congressmen have an actual passing interest in cost-benefit analysis.
But it's also troubling because Democrats aren't going to go back and modify the bill into something good, the way that many of them are currently imagining. The bill will be modified, piece by piece, according to the same crappy process that produced the current monstrosity: horse trading, log rolling, and all. (Yes, even if you use the magic of budget reconciliation, which still offers lavish opportunities for pork and stupidity).
Some of the things you think you are going to get, you won't; they may very well be the crucial parts that make everything else work as you actually plan. At every step, the bill is probably more likely to get worse than to get better. At any rate, passing a bill based on either a meaningless CBO score, or the notion that it can be rewritten to spec at some later date, is not a process for generating good legislation.