Word: cbo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...partly because most of his curve-bending ideas - computerized records to bring medicine into the 21st century, comparative effectiveness studies to identify unnecessary treatments, revamped incentives to reward quality rather than volume of care - would take more than a decade to start slashing costs, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn't score bills for their impact on the federal deficit that far in advance. Obama's most prominent game changer - an independent panel to set Medicare reimbursement policies removed from political pressures - did not fare well under the conservative CBO scoring system either. The only proposal that really impressed...
...There have been times when Obama has intervened behind the scenes to keep lawmakers from going off track. The President was alarmed, for instance, when Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), declared on July 16 that the measures thus far produced in the House and Senate failed to bring the "fundamental change" needed to bring down health costs in the long run. So the following Monday, he summoned Elmendorf, former CBO director Alice Rivlin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber and Harvard University's David Cutler to the Oval Office to go over the bills...
...Medicaid and cutting programs and services that aren't deemed cost-effective. But one of the most recently touted potential methods, the creation of an independent board to take away from Congress the job of overseeing the rates of Medicare payments, took a hit late last week when the CBO estimated it would save only $2 billion over 10 years. The CBO acknowledged that the savings could turn out to be higher in the long run, but that qualifier highlighted one of the biggest problems for health-care-reform backers: the potential cost savings of overhauling the entire health-care...
...Watching what happened to the HELP Committee, you could understand why the Finance Committee would decide to delay its own markup. After all, it had been warned by the CBO that an early draft of its bill would have an even larger price tag than the HELP Committee's - it would increase the deficit by more than $1.6 trillion over the next decade. So Finance Committee members will be spending the next few weeks trying to reduce the price tag. It is looking, for instance, for ways to make sure that people who now get coverage from their employers cannot...
...they are content to watch this ugly phase of the process - one of many it is likely to go through before it is over - from the sidelines. "It's going to look like a mess for a few weeks," said an official. "But overall, we think this is helpful. CBO has sent a signal that everyone needed to hear: This is not just an intellectual exercise...