Word: cbo
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...intimidate those at the pinnacles of power. A soft-spoken academic who coaches his daughters' soccer team, he is described by virtually everyone who knows him as a genuinely nice guy. But consider some of the things that have been said about the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and his ideas during the past year. "Off the wall," fumed Dave Obey, the famously volatile chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has suggested - and not in a nice way - that Elmendorf's presumption is such that "maybe what he should...
...this morass, Democrats assert that their plan, which subsidizes about 30 million people so that they can afford coverage, will lower the deficit. Fears of higher taxes and bigger deficits, they sneer, are unfounded. Their reasoning? The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says so. But they raise taxes to pay for the subsidies—a surcharge on the rich in the House of Representatives, a tax on “Cadillac plans” in the Senate—taxes that could have gone exclusively to reducing the deficit. And the CBO warns that the deficit will lessen only...
...setting a new national MLR floor is not the end of the equation. The CBO, in its report on the regulations, said insurers might react to new thresholds by "cutting back on efforts to restrain benefit costs through care management." Translation: Anything that doesn't count as "medical costs" may be on the chopping block, including exorbitant executive salaries but also programs to keep patients healthy. There is also a fear among health policy experts that some insurers could raise premiums in reaction - higher premiums means more money spent on health care, but also more left over for profits. Another...
There is still plenty of room for improvement, according to the AAA. The CLASS Act doesn't include sufficient funding to market the program, meaning participation will be low - the CBO says 5% of the population would sign up, the CMS actuary says 2.5%, and AAA says 6%. Such low participation would not allow risk to be spread out enough to keep premiums affordable; in that case, the program could end up in an "insurance death spiral," in which premiums are so high, only those who know they'll need coverage sign up, driving up premiums even further until they...
Paul Van de Water, a longtime CBO analyst and now senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, says the CLASS Act doesn't have strong enough work requirements, which are intended to be a proxy for physical fitness. Americans who perform only seasonal work, for example, could qualify for the program. He adds that penalties for letting premium payments lapse are not strong enough. "The criticisms are absolutely true, but you design things the best you can. If we only did [legislation] that entailed no risk, I don't think we'd ever do much of anything...