White House Attempts to Have It Both Ways
Yesterday evening, the White House issued a blog post attempting to trumpet CBO’s re-estimate of Obamacare: the CBO estimate “affirms that repealing the health care law would…result in higher deficits.” The post later went on to rebut CBO’s assumption that many states would not fully expand their Medicaid programs as provided for in the law. The White House alleged that “history suggests that [states] will act” to implement the expansion.
There’s just one problem with that latter assertion: If all states implement the Medicaid expansion, more than three-fourths – $84 billion of approximately $109 billion – in Obamacare’s supposed deficit savings* will evaporate. So the White House is attempting to argue both sides of the story – that the law will reduce the deficit by a wide amount, but that states will all expand Medicaid, even though their doing so would eliminate most of the law’s supposed savings.
The fact that the White House feels the need to take both sides of this argument shows how fiscally flawed the measure is – why it should be repealed, and why repeal will ultimately save taxpayers in the long run.
* Admittedly, CBO said the $109 billion figure associated with repealing the law was not an exact estimation (in reverse) of the law’s deficit impact – largely because CBO assumes a repeal bill would not take effect immediately. That said, because CBO hasn’t re-estimated the full law, the score of the repeal measure is the closest approximation we have to the measure’s full fiscal effects.