Politics – Page 15 – Donald Marron

Good and Bad News for the House Health Bill

In my recent paper about how the Congressional Budget Office analyzes health proposals, I noted that one of the most important things that CBO does is to provide additional information about its cost estimates. Cost estimates often can’t speak for themselves, so it’s important that members of Congress and other interested observers ask for additional clarification about key issues.

Well, four leading House Republicans recently took this step, and CBO’s response is a doozy. It contains too much to summarize here, so let me focus on the two most important points:

CBO reiterated its conclusion that the introduction of a public plan (as specified in the bill) would not undermine private health insurance markets. Most Americans would continue to get their health insurance through employers.

CBO confirmed that the bill would worsen future deficits.

Supporters of the bill will emphasize the first finding as evidence that the public plan won’t gut private insurance markets. Opponents of the bill will emphasize the second finding as evidence that the bill is fiscally reckless.

Neither of these conclusions should be a surprise to anyone, since the basic facts were reported in CBO’s original cost estimate. However, the new letter does provide useful context.

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Another Budget Blow to Health Reform

Policymakers are discovering that the road to health care reform in anything but smooth. The latest speed bump involves the Administration’s proposal to rein in future Medicare costs by empowering a new panel (the Independent Medicare Advisory Council) to recommend future spending reductions. If accepted by future Presidents, the commission’s recommendations would take effect unless Congress intervened.

As I mentioned the other day, there is some logic to this approach. Politics sometimes play an unseemly — and costly role — in decisions about Medicare payment rates. Limiting Congress’s role in setting those rates might therefore by a money-saver.

The devil is in the details, however, and earlier today the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the details don’t add up to much.

CBO estimates that the proposed legislation would save a paltry $2 billion over the next ten years, less than 1/500 of the 10-year cost of health reform. That estimate reflects CBO’s assessment of various possible outcomes:

[T]he probability is high that no savings would be realized, …, but there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized. Looking beyond the 10-year budget window, CBO expects that this proposal would generate larger but still modest savings on the same probabilistic basis.

Advocates of the IMAC approach will clearly have to go back to the drawing board if they want to get larger savings in the first 10 years. The good news for them is that CBO explains why the estimated savings over the next ten years are so low and provides some guidance on what might be necessary to increase them.

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The Politics of Oxygen

Today’s WSJ has a fun profile of Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the challenges he faces making cost control a key part of health care reform.

I particularly enjoyed this episode:

The battle heated up in June, when Mr. Orszag visited Capitol Hill to discuss health care with a small group of House Democrats. The meeting started well, with one lawmaker after another echoing his message that spending controls were critical to any health-care overhaul, according to two administration officials.

Then one member said her top priority was winning higher payments for oxygen suppliers, the officials say. Mr. Orszag was taken aback. Officials had been trying for years to cut payments to suppliers of oxygen and other medical equipment, which critics say are inflated. Yet when a new competitive bidding process was set to take effect last year, industry supporters in Congress were able to delay the plan. They are still fighting to block changes.

“One of the reasons we currently have such disjointed and skewed incentives is that we have an excessively political process,” Mr. Orszag said in an interview.

I think Peter is absolutely correct.

When I first worked for Congress, I was stunned by the amount of time and effort that members gave to issues that struck me as minutiae. This was particularly severe in health care. Congressional staff — and, at times the members themselves — would worry about things like payment rates for wheel chairs, bidding rules for oxygen suppliers, and other micro-health financing issues.

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A Glimmer of Fiscal Discipline

Yesterday delivered a small piece of good news on the budget front. As reported by the Washington Post:

The Senate voted Tuesday to kill the nation’s premier fighter-jet program, embracing by a 58 to 40 margin the argument of President Obama and his top military advisers that more F-22s are not needed for the nation’s defense and would be a costly drag on the Pentagon’s budget in an era of small wars and counterinsurgency efforts.

As I noted in a recent post, President Obama deserves kudos for threatening to veto any appropriations defense authorization bill that would include extra funding for the F-22. And the Senate deserves credit for agreeing. The House wasn’t as frugal, including $369 million in initial funding for additional fighters in its version of the appropriations authorization bill. So the next test will be to see what emerges from the House-Senate conference on the bill. (Update: And then, as Stan Collender reminds us, what happens in the actual appropriations.)

The amounts of money are, of course, small relative to today’s trillion-dollar deficits. But perhaps they are a first step toward some semblance of fiscal discipline. Budget hawks are rightly concerned about the growth of spending on the major entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — but defense spending should also get close scrutiny. With annual appropriations reaching almost $700 billion, reductions in defense spending will almost certainly be part of any effort to put our fiscal house back in order (barring major new hostilities).

P.S. Back in 2006, I testified before Congress about some of the budget gimmicks that the Air Force was then trying to use to get funding for more F-22s. One trick was to try to get a small amount of initial funding for planes in one year, so that in later years it could go back and say “well, we already started these planes, so you have to give us $x billion to finish them.” Sounds like the folks in the House were considering something similar.

Disclosure: I have no investments in any aerospace company.

Beyond the $23.7 Trillion Headline

Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (affectionately known as SIGTARP), is making headlines with his estimate that the government has provided “potential support totaling more than $23.7 trillion” in fighting the financial crisis. That estimate will be officially released on Tuesday morning in the SIGTARP’s latest quarterly report (you can find an early copy here – ht WSJ).

As the media are already noting (e.g., WSJ and Yahoo), there are many reasons to believe that the $23.7 trillion figure is overstated. For example, as noted in the footnote to the table above, the figure “may include overlapping agency liabilities … and unfunded initiatives [and] … does not account for collateral pledged.” In other words, there may be double-counting, some of the programs won’t happen or are already winding down, and the estimates assume that any collateral is worthless. For example, to get to $5.5 trillion in potential losses on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (part of the $7.2 trillion Other category), you would have to assume that all GSE-backed mortgages default and that all houses backing them are worthless.

In short, the SIGTARP estimate is a way upper-bound on likely Federal support to the financial support. That fact shouldn’t detract, however, from the importance of the rest of this report.

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House Bill Fails Budget Tests

Lawmakers face more work if they want to pay for health reform. According to the latest analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the House health bill fails two key budget tests:

New spending isn’t fully paid for. House committees haven’t identified enough spending reductions or tax increases to offset the spending. As a result, the bill would increase the deficit by $239 billion over the next ten years.

The bill would widen the structural deficit. CBO estimates, for example, that the program would increase the deficit by $65 billion in 2019, the final year of the budget window.

These budget challenges stem from the fact that the House bill would increase spending in two major ways:

First, the House bill would increase health insurance coverage. As noted in a previous CBO analysis (and summarized in a recent post), that effort would have a net budget impact of $1.04 trillion over the next ten years; spending would increase by almost $1.3 trillion, while tax revenues would increase by about $240 billion.

Second, the bill would change the formula that determines how much Medicare pays physicians. Those payment rates are scheduled to be cut 21% next year under an arcane formula (the sustainable growth rate mechanism). The House bill would replace those cuts with increases in coming years, at a cost of $245 billion over the next ten years.

As I’ve noted in previous posts (e.g., here), a key risk is that health reform would put the U.S. on an even worse fiscal trajectory. As shown in the following graph, that’s exactly what would happen under the current House bill:

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CBO, Health, and the Budget

As I’ve discussed in a series of posts (e.g., here and here), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has a pivotal role in the health debate. By telling Congress how potential policy changes would affect the budget, CBO analyses can make or break proposed legislation.

As a result, I think it’s important that participants in the health debate – policymakers, analysts, journalists, and ordinary citizens – understand how CBO approaches health issues. That can sometimes be a challenge, however. As I note in a new paper:

CBO analyses often rely on sophisticated economic modeling and are usually framed in ways that match the specific, sometimes arcane, requirements of the congressional budget process. As a result, the cost estimates and related analyses may sometimes be challenging to understand. The unfortunate result can be confusion about what the scores mean and, equally important, what they do not mean.

That’s not a knock on CBO, which I think does a great job; it’s just the nature of the work.

To help reduce potential confusion, my paper (“Understanding CBO Health Cost Estimates”) discusses how CBO approaches cost estimates and some of the particular issues that arise in health policy. Many of the insights come directly from recent CBO reports (CBO takes transparency seriously), while others are based on my own experiences at CBO.

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Raising the Curve, Not Bending It

Doug Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, has one of the most difficult and important jobs in Washington: delivering tough budget news to Congress.

Americans are fortunate that he is so good at it.

Today, Doug’s message was particularly stark — and, in many circles, unwelcome — as he reported that the health reform proposals now under consideration by Congress would worsen our already-daunting fiscal outlook.

As noted by the Associated Press:

From the beginning of the health care debate, Obama has insisted that any overhaul must “bend the curve” of rapidly rising costs that threaten to swamp the budgets of government, businesses and families.

Asked by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., if the evolving legislation would bend the cost curve, the budget director responded that — as things stand now — “the curve is being raised.”

Explained Elmendorf: “In the legislation that has been reported, we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.”

Even if the legislation doesn’t add to the federal deficit over the next years, Elmendorf said costs over the long run would keep rising at an unsustainable pace.

Standing Firm on Auto Dealers

Over the past year, the U.S. government has acquired an unprecedented investment portfolio, including a majority stake in GM and a large ownership stake in Chrysler. These investments have raised a plethora of difficult policy challenges. One of the most important is the ongoing risk that private business decisions may get transformed into public policy issues. Or, put more bluntly, that policymakers might use the ownership stakes as justification for and leverage to pursue their own policy agendas, regardless of whether they would be good for the companies.

Yesterday’s newspapers provided an excellent example of this risk. Some lawmakers want to use legislation — the annual appropriations bill that funds financial services and general government — to restore the franchise agreements of several thousand dealers who were terminated as part of the restructuring of GM and Chrysler. It’s easy to see how such a proposal can gain traction in the House of Representatives. Every terminated dealership will get a sympathetic hearing, at a minimum, from their local representative. But such meddling is not in the interests of GM and Chrysler, nor the nation at large.

Happily, the Obama Administration has come out against these efforts. In a Statement of Administration Policy on the appropriations bill released Wednesday, the Administration wrote:

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Defending the Fed’s Independence

I’m not usually one to sign public petitions, but I made an exception today for a key issue: defending the independence of the Federal Reserve.

Like many other economists (here’s the list of signatories, with a day’s lag), I am troubled by the anti-Fed rhetoric emanating from some parts of the Congress. The Fed has taken a remarkable series of actions that deserve close congressional oversight. But that oversight should not endanger the Fed’s fundamental independence in executing monetary policy.

The petition therefore makes three important points about Fed independence:

First, central bank independence has been shown to be essential for controlling inflation. Sooner or later, the Fed will have to scale back its current unprecedented monetary accommodation. When the Federal Reserve judges it time to begin tightening monetary conditions, it must be allowed to do so without interference.

Second, lender of last resort decisions should not be politicized.

Finally, calls to alter the structure or personnel selection of the Federal Reserve System easily could backfire by raising inflation expectations and borrowing costs and dimming prospects for recovery. The democratic legitimacy of the Federal Reserve System is well established by its legal mandate and by the existing appointments process. Frequent communication with the public and testimony before Congress ensure Fed accountability.

Over at the WSJ, David Wessel has a nice piece on the petition.