CBO Error: Senate Health Bill WON'T Reduce Deficits as Much

Well, what do you know about that?

The Congressional Budget Office screwed up. Harry Reid's health care bill won't REDUCE deficits as much as was announced on Saturday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has proposed several changes to sweeping U.S. healthcare reform legislation being debated in the Senate. The proposed amendment has to be approved by the Senate.

Here is a summary of those proposed changes and revised cost estimates made public by the Congressional Budget Office on Saturday.

COST ESTIMATES

* The Congressional Budget Office said the legislation, with the proposed changes that are being offered as an amendment to the bill, would cost about $871 billion over the first 10 years. Those costs would be more than offset by $483 billion in spending savings and $498 billion in revenues over the period. CBO said the bill would reduce the deficit by about $132 billion between 2010 and 2019.

OOPS!

The CBO got that wrong.

From FOX News:

The Congressional Budget Office said Sunday that the Senate health care bill would not reduce long-term federal deficits as much as previously estimated, acknowledging that it made an "error" in its original analysis.

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf wrote in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that while the correction has no bearing on estimates for the impact of the bill over the next decade, it does slightly reduce the amount of money the plan is expected to save for the 2020-2029 period.

The original estimate said the health care overhaul would yield deficit reductions worth about one-half percent of GDP -- the revision put that figure between one-quarter and one-half percent.

He also wrote that savings from Medicare cuts and changes would add up to about 10 to 15 percent per year in that period, compared with the 15 percent savings in the original projection.

Elmendorf said the legislation should still reduce budget deficits after 2019 -- but just not as much.

The CBO rarely makes such long-term estimates for proposed legislation but in this case did it anyway. Senate Republicans swiftly seized on the error, calling it "major." In correcting the mistake, Elmendorf noted that projections for a bill 10-to-20 years down the road can be highly unreliable.

"The imprecision of these calculations reflects the even greater degree of uncertainty that attends to them," he wrote.

Here's the CBO letter to Harry Reid.

This is such a mess.

The push to vote on this bill on Christmas Eve is ridiculous.

It's utterly irresponsible. In other words, it's exactly what I've come to expect from the Obama regime and his Democrats.