CBO Gives Up Trying To Score Impact of Obamacare

June 5th, 2014

One of the lingering questions I’ve tried to keep in context over the past year has been, what is the effect of Obamacare? How do things before Obamacare compare to things after Obamacare? The Census Bureau took some serious flac for changing the way data is collected, which would make it effectively impossible to compare the rate of insured people before and after the ACA. Now, the Congressional Budget Office has thrown in the towel, and admitted that it is impossible to continue scoring the impact of this Leviathan.

Congressional budget scorekeepers said they can no longer measure the fiscal impact of many provisions of ObamaCare because the task is impossible.

In a little-noticed footnote from April, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said it will continue to assess the effects of the law’s exchange subsidies and the Medicaid expansion, while not tracking others.

“The provisions that expand insurance coverage established entirely new programs or components of programs that can be isolated and reassessed,” the office wrote. 

“In contrast, other provisions of the Affordable Care Act significantly modified existing federal programs and made changes to the Internal Revenue Code. 

“Isolating the incremental effects of those provisions on previously existing programs and revenues four years after enactment of the Affordable Care Act is not possible.” 

In other words, we give up. BTW, this change was buried in a trove released in April.

In other news, over a million people will likely have to pay back the government because they received too much subsidies on the Obamacare website. I’d like to see them collect.