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> so why is this bias? why isn't it simply that palin and bachmann are liars? I hesitate to get into this, but Peter Orszag has only been tagged by Politifact

by temphn 15y ago

> so why is this bias? why isn't it simply that palin and bachmann are liars? I hesitate to get into this, but Peter Orszag has only been tagged by Politifact once[1]. Yet at the time he was CBO director, there were many people stating that CBO was distorting long term projections to show that Obama's health care bill saved money. And recently the administration appeared to acknowledge that these projections were (at a minimum) indeed inaccurate[2,3]. By scrapping the CLASS Act, HHS is losing about 40 percent of the savings healthcare reform was supposed to generate. The Congressional Budget Office’s most recent estimates projected $210 billion in total deficit reduction from the healthcare law, $86 billion of which would have come from CLASS. HHS officials emphasized Friday that the healthcare reform law is still projected to cut the deficit, since about $125 billion of the most recent savings estimates are still intact. Now, you can determine for yourself whether you believe HHS and CBO's other projections given that this program was found to be insolvent before it was even launched. Please also note that there was no shortage of people vociferously opposing[4] the healthcare bill before passage who called out this particular provision as unsustainable due to adverse selection effects. The CLASS Act looks like a gift: It brings in $58 billion in net tax revenues by 2019, lowering the deficit by an equivalent amount because only minor costs will be booked during that period. Under the CBO rules, the CLASS Act technically covers one-quarter of the $250 billion shortfall in funds needed to pay for health-care reform. The gimmick lies in looking only at the CBO's ten-year budget window. The extra revenues are an illusion because of the disaster lurking just beyond that horizon. In fact, none of the $58 billion is available to pay for the House bill. The CLASS Act is so poorly designed that the $58 billion reserve and all future premiums won't come close to covering the generous benefits it's promising. Here's why the mechanics of the CLASS Act assure its eventual collapse. You may disagree, but this is one relatively cut and dried example in which the critics of the healthcare bill appear to have been proven right. Indeed, evidence-laden, numerical critiques of this particular "CLASS Act" provision were all over the web along with charges of falsehood by Orszag. Yet at the time when it might have moved the needle, Politifact was silent on this issue. This may be what OP is referring to in terms of a selection issue. They simply did not engage the CBO's projections, even though they were far more amenable to classification as "true" or "false" than standard political statements. They were also inarguably important. [1] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/peter-orszag/ http://www.politifact.com/personalities/peter-orszag/ [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/health/policy/15health.html?ref=healthcarereform http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/health/policy/15health.htm... [3] http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/187697-hhs-to-suspend-class-program http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implement... [4] http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/03/news/economy/health_care_class_act.fortune/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/03/news/economy/health_care_cla...

Anechoic 15y ago
Is there a particular statement from Orszag that you feel Politifact should have addressed?
- temphn 15y ago
  Well, this one is interesting. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/10/03/04/No-Gimmick/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/10/03/04/No-Gimmick/ Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to a claim that this deficit reduction is achieved only through a business-as-usual Washington budget gimmick: paying for just a few years of costs with many more years of savings. This charge is simply false—and let’s get the facts straight. ... Third, this is not a budget gimmick. The purpose the tried-and-true gimmick described above is to make a proposal that adds to long-term deficits appear fiscally responsible. But if that were the course we were taking, we would expect to see a large fiscal hole at the end of the first decade and larger and larger deficits in the second decade. Instead, over the long-term, the savings under the President’s plan are expected to grow faster than the costs. So, when the Congressional Budget Office is done with its scoring, we expect it will find that the President’s plan reduces deficits by roughly $100 billion in the first 10 years and roughly $1 trillion in the decade after that. In other words, health reform should reduce the deficit by growing amounts over the long-term. Put simply: Health reform will reduce the deficit in this decade, and it will reduce the deficit by even more thereafter. There’s no gimmick in that. A program which was supposed to save $86 billion is declared insolvent and discontinued before it was put into production, by the people who were intimately involved in designing it. They pushed hard to pass the bill and made statements like Orszag did above. In the interest of being nonpartisan, I think that history will look on these kinds of statements in the same way we now look on Colin Powell's presentation to the UN in the context of the runup to Iraq. At best the WMDs/savings just weren't there, and it was an honest mistake. At worst, they lied. Somewhere in the middle one might call them guilty of wishful thinking and exaggeration. But whatever you call it, it's hard to continue to maintain that those who claimed the presence of WMD/savings were empirically correct.
  - Anechoic 15y ago

by temphn 15y ago

Anechoic 15y ago

Is there a particular statement from Orszag that you feel Politifact should have addressed?

temphn 15y ago
Well, this one is interesting. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/10/03/04/No-Gimmick/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/10/03/04/No-Gimmick/ Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to a claim that this deficit reduction is achieved only through a business-as-usual Washington budget gimmick: paying for just a few years of costs with many more years of savings. This charge is simply false—and let’s get the facts straight. ... Third, this is not a budget gimmick. The purpose the tried-and-true gimmick described above is to make a proposal that adds to long-term deficits appear fiscally responsible. But if that were the course we were taking, we would expect to see a large fiscal hole at the end of the first decade and larger and larger deficits in the second decade. Instead, over the long-term, the savings under the President’s plan are expected to grow faster than the costs. So, when the Congressional Budget Office is done with its scoring, we expect it will find that the President’s plan reduces deficits by roughly $100 billion in the first 10 years and roughly $1 trillion in the decade after that. In other words, health reform should reduce the deficit by growing amounts over the long-term. Put simply: Health reform will reduce the deficit in this decade, and it will reduce the deficit by even more thereafter. There’s no gimmick in that. A program which was supposed to save $86 billion is declared insolvent and discontinued before it was put into production, by the people who were intimately involved in designing it. They pushed hard to pass the bill and made statements like Orszag did above. In the interest of being nonpartisan, I think that history will look on these kinds of statements in the same way we now look on Colin Powell's presentation to the UN in the context of the runup to Iraq. At best the WMDs/savings just weren't there, and it was an honest mistake. At worst, they lied. Somewhere in the middle one might call them guilty of wishful thinking and exaggeration. But whatever you call it, it's hard to continue to maintain that those who claimed the presence of WMD/savings were empirically correct.
- Anechoic 15y ago