Finally. You come up with sources critical of the CBO.
Let's look at the first one together. I read it and here is the conclusion:
"Projecting the economic impact of major pieces of legislation is a difficult task with substantial amounts of uncertainty. To its credit, CBO acknowledges this, even as there is a tendency elsewhere to treat CBO estimates as gospel. Since CBO estimates will once again play a prominent role in the coming ACA repeal and replace debate, it is important to appreciate the large degree of uncertainty and to understand CBO’s key mistakes estimating the ACA. In particular, it would be good to know the steps CBO has taken to correct for its two biggest mistakes—overestimating the effect of the individual mandate and failing to anticipate how states would respond to the elevated reimbursement rate for the Medicaid expansion population. CBO should then inform lawmakers how it has adjusted its model and assumptions. And irrespective of CBO’s methodological changes, lawmakers should proceed with full awareness of the limits of CBO’s projection capability."
Sounds totally reasonable and like an organization doing it's best to assess a complicated problem while revising it's forecast as new information comes in. Great! This is hard stuff, but it's the best and most reliable predictions we have available. You don't need to be critical of them when they issue a disclaimer. One thing I will note about this article, frequently the author will say things like this: "CBO’s model has consistently and significantly overestimated the effect of the individual mandate in inducing people to enroll in the exchanges." But crucially avoids telling the reader what the "consistent" and "significant" overestimation was. Was it 5%? 50%? To his credit, he does say that their initial estimation of people enrolled in the expansion was 20M when ultimately only 10M enrolled. The compounding factor of lower than expected GDP is interesting and something I was unaware of.
Great article. Especially good graph here that is also in my previous links. The 2010 estimate for ACA Medicaid expansion spending in 2016 was off by $15-20 billion. For an estimate 6 years out, for something as monumental as the ACA was, I think that's pretty impressive actuarial work. I understand why you want to be critical of that, but it is a pretty impressive achievement to me.
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