Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney lashed out at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Wednesday saying the days of the agency as a trusted non-partisan organization “have probably come and gone.”
Mulvaney called the CBO’s scoring of the House Republican health care bill “absurd” in an interview with the Washington Examiner and argued it was an example of the organization’s partisanship.
He criticized the CBO’s recent projection that 23 million fewer people would be insured under the American Health Care Act in ten years relative to Obamacare. He went on to describe a problem many critics of the CBO’s projections have identified — the score ascribes an unrealistic degree of influence to the Obamacare individual mandate, which requires individuals to purchase health insurance under threat of a fine.
“Did you see the methodology on that 23 million people getting kicked off their health insurance?” he told the Washington Examiner. “You recognize of course that they assume that people voluntarily get off of Medicaid? That’s just not defensible. It’s almost as if they went into it and said, ‘Okay, we need this score to look bad. How do we do it?'”
Mulvaney correctly points out that the CBO’s projections assume that roughly one-third of people who register for Medicaid do so to avoid paying a fine. This assumption contradicts the experience of insurers and actuaries who place the percentage of individuals who signed up for Medicaid because of the mandate at around 5 percent. (RELATED: Reports That 23 Million Americans Will Lose Health Care Are WAY Off)
Mulvaney attributed the CBO’s missteps to partisanship.
“If the same person is doing the score of undoing Obamacare who did the scoring of Obamacare in the first place, my guess is that there is probably some sort of bias in favor of a government mandate,” he said.
He went on to suggest that reports by multiple independent organizations should replace the CBO’s analysis.
“I would do my own studies here at OMB as to what the cost and benefits of that reg would be,” he said. “And other folks would do their studies from the outside … You and I and other lawmakers can sit down and say, ‘Okay, we think that this is where it is, and we’ll make our decisions based upon that.'”
Mulvaney said he doesn’t have a problem with the CBO continuing to exist as long as the organization rededicates itself to true non-partisan analysis, but he argued they should not be the go to arbiters of legislation.
“To defer to them, I think is giving them way too much authority,” he said. “Certainly there is value in having that information, especially if they could return to their nonpartisan roots. But at the same time you can function, you can have a government, without a Congressional Budget Office.”
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