Should-Read: Avik Roy: An Autopsy of the GOP Effort to Repeal and Replace Obamacare

Should-Read: Avik Roy told a lot of lies in his vain attempt to get BCRA passed.

Now here he is calling for the corruption of the Congressional Budget Office.

Every single former Director of the CBO regards its independence as an extremely valuable national treasure. And Roy’s claim that the CBO was in the pocket of the Democrats is hogwash. In almost the next breath after saying that Democrats had “a deliberate strategy to stack the CBO”, he admits that President Obama “opposed the individual mandate”—if there was an alternative strategy that would have gotten coverage. CBO judged that there wasn’t—that Obama’s preferred bill would not work.

The difference between CBO scores of the Democratic and Republican health care bills is not because the CBO is stacked in favor of Democrats, it is because the Democrats were willing to listen to the CBO and craft bills that the CBO judged were likely to work, while the Republicans were unwilling to listen to the CBO and so crafted bills that the CBO judged were unlikely to work:

Avik Roy: An Autopsy of the GOP Effort to Repeal and Replace Obamacare: “Moderate Republican senators, often representing purple or blue states, were reluctant both philosophically and politically to endorse legislation that increased the number of Americans without health insurance… http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/449943/autopsy-gop-effort-repeal-and-replace-obamacare

…Conservative Republican senators focused on the commitment they (and most of the moderates) had made to repeal and replace Obamacare, and more broadly, their commitment to limited government…. Democrats passed Obamacare… by uniting their ideological and pragmatic wings…. When Democrats retook Congress in 2006, they appointed Peter Orszag to head the CBO, as part of a deliberate strategy to stack the CBO in favor of their health-care agenda. Orszag proceeded to build out the entire health policy wing of the CBO—representing dozens of staffers—with like-minded individuals…. The Affordable Care Act reflects the CBO’s worldview. While Senator Obama opposed the individual mandate, the CBO believed it would add 16 million covered lives to the ACA’s ledger….

Compare and contrast that to the GOP’s effort. When Republicans had the opportunity to appoint a CBO director in 2015, they chose not to hire someone with deep health-care expertise… and instead hired… a labor economist. There was no comparable strategy, either by Hall or by Congress, to rebalance the CBO’s center-left tilt with individuals more knowledgeable about how health insurance markets actually work. Hence… the CBO was poised to make any GOP bill look bad…