Category: Politics

CLASS Act Fails the Offset Test

If you take budgeting seriously, people sometimes think you are a curmudgeon. When I was at the Congressional Budget Office, for example, we were once denounced as anti-housing because we concluded that increasing subsidies for low-income housing wasn’t free. CBO reached that conclusion using an advanced tool known as “arithmetic”, but some advocates tried to portray it as an anti-housing policy statement.

At the risk of again appearing curmudgeonly, I would like to draw your attention to a provision in the health care reform bill being considered by the Senate HELP Committee. That provision, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, would create a new program to insure participants against some of the financial costs of disability and long-term care.

I have nothing to say about the merits of this provision, except to note that it has one of the best acronyms in legislative history: the CLASS Act.

I have a great deal to say, however, about the arithmetic of the CLASS Act, because it illustrates just how hard it will be for our legislative process to really pay for health care reform.

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We Already Did a Second Stimulus

Much ink, both physical and electronic, has recently been spilled on the question of whether the United States should undertake a second stimulus.

To which there is only one possible answer: we already did a second stimulus.

The first stimulus — the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 — was signed by President Bush in February 2008. That Act gave families $115 billion in tax rebates and allowed companies to depreciate business investment more rapidly. Overall, the Act reduced taxes and increased spending by $168 billion in 2008 and 2009 (the long-term budget hit from the Act is smaller — about $124 billion over ten years — because the corporate tax reductions deferred tax payments rather than eliminating them.)

Those were the days before the collapse of Lehman (heck, it was even before the collapse of Bear Stearns) when policymakers were rightly worried about a weak economy, but $168 billion seemed like a lot of money.

The second stimulus — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 –was signed by President Obama in February 2009. That Act increases spending on a host of programs, including infrastructure, state assistance, and extended unemployment insurance. It also created the Making Work Pay tax credit, among other tax reductions. The Act is usually described as a $787 billion stimulus, with ten-year spending increases of $575 billion and tax reductions of $212 billion. The reality is a bit more complex, however. On the one hand, the Act provides somewhat more stimulus than the headline figure; for example, there are about $810 billion in spending increases and tax reductions during the first seven years. On the other hand, the stimulus takes time to phase in; during fiscal 2009, for example, the estimated stimulus is about $185 billion.

The question we face today is whether to enact a third stimulus, not a second one. I will have more to say on this in the future. For now, I think the Obama administration has it exactly right, indicating that it’s premature to enact a third stimulus, but their economic team is closely monitoring the situation.

CBO on the New HELP Bill

On Thursday evening, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary analysis of the latest version of Title I of the Affordable Health Choices Act, commonly known as the HELP bill or the Kennedy bill (since it’s the product of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions which Senator Kennedy chairs).

Based on a quick review, here are the top six things I think you should know about the cost estimate:

1.  The analysis is preliminary. CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation have not yet had time to analyze every provision in the bill, some provisions remain in flux, and new provisions may be added. Health policy continues to be a moving target.

2. The headline cost of the bill — about $600 billion over ten years — is significantly lower than the $1 trillion net cost of the previous version of the bill. The net costs declined because (i) the subsidies for coverage through health insurance exchanges are now smaller, (ii) employers would have to pay a penalty if they do not offer insurance to their workers, and (iii) it would be much harder for employees to get subsidies in the exchange if their employer offers health insurance.

Note: The new CBO tables cover Title I of the bill, which has a net budget cost of $597 billion.  CBO had earlier scored other portions of the bill as costing $14 billion. As a result, you will hear some commentators using the $597 billion figure and others using $611 billion.

3. As usual, it’s important to unpack the headline cost into its constituent parts: the 10-year cost of expanding health insurance coverage in Title I is about $743 billion and a separate provision adds an additional $10 billion. That $753 billion cost is then partially offset by penalties on employers who don’t offer coverage to their workers ($52 billion), penalties on uninsured individuals ($36 billion), higher income and payroll taxes ($10 billion), and the net premiums generated by a program (CLASS) to provide long-term care insurance ($58 billion). The income and payroll tax offset is much smaller than in the previous version of the bill because the current draft would have a much smaller impact on employer-provided health insurance.

4. The bill includes provisions for a public plan, but CBO concludes that these provisions would “not have a substantial effect on the cost or enrollment projections.” CBO reaches that conclusion because “the public plan would pay providers of health care at rates comparable to privately negotiated rates–and thus was not projected to have premiums lower than those charged by private insurance plans in the exchanges.” In short, the reduced cost of the bill is due to the factors outlined in the previous paragraph, not to the public plan.

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Big Money in Cap-and-Trade

On Friday, the House of Representatives passed its climate change bill by a slim margin. The bill’s key feature is a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. That system would set national emission limits and would require affected emitters to own permits (called allowances) to cover their emissions.

The number one thing you should know about this bill is that the allowances are worth big money: almost $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and more in subsequent decades.

There are many good things the government could do with that kind of money. Perhaps reduce out-of-control deficits? Or pay for expanding health coverage? Or maybe, as many economists have suggested, reduce payroll taxes and corporate income taxes to offset the macroeconomic costs of limiting greenhouse gases?

Choosing among those options would be a worthy policy debate. Except for one thing: the House bill would give away most of the allowances for free. And it spends virtually all the revenue that comes from allowance auctions.

As a result, the budget hawks, health expanders, and pro-growth forces have only crumbs to bargain over. From a budgeteer’s perspective, the House bill is a disaster.

The following table illustrates how much revenue the bill would raise and compares it to the alternative of auctioning all the allowances:

Cap-and-trade revenues

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Paying for Health Reform III

Last week I published two posts expressing concern about how Congress might pay for proposed health reforms. The first post argued that policymakers should focus on the trajectory of new spending and offsets, not just the cumulative 10-year budget scores. The second post expressed concern that the offsets used to pay for health reform may include policies that otherwise would have been used to reduce our out-of-control deficits; as a result health reform that appears to be “paid for” could nonetheless worsen our long-run budget trajectory.

Needless to say, these issues are receiving lots of attention around the budgeting parts of the Web. Some important contributions include:

  • Over at the eponymous KeithHennessey.com, Keith Hennessey points out something I missed. In a Financial Times piece on June 22, OMB Director Peter Orszag suggested that paying for health reform over a 10-year budget window isn’t enough for budget neutrality. That’s exactly the point I made in my first post. Peter then sets out a second requirement: that health care reform must be “deficit neutral in the 10th year alone.” This is a good step, since it would rule out some trajectories of spending that would obviously worsen the long-run deficit. As Keith points out, this requirement isn’t sufficient by itself: you need to worry about the entire trajectory of spending and offsets, not just a single year. Nonetheless, it is a very good sign that the Administration is pointing out the limitations of 10-year budget scores.

Health and the Rule of Three

When policy debates heat up, it’s not enough for policy analysts to run the numbers and for political analysts to count votes and gauge the influence of affected interests. You also need communicators to craft a crisp, clean message. One that resonates with listeners consciously and, if possible, subconsciously.

Every word counts. As a result, one of the key communication battlegrounds is very basic: What do you call the policy?  If you can win the naming battle, you are a long way toward winning the policy war.

Having participated in a number of these debates, I would like to offer the following conjecture, which I will boldly characterize as a rule:

The Rule of Three:  If debate about an economic policy is sufficiently important, that policy will have three different names: one used by proponents, one used by opponents, and one used by non-partisan agencies that don’t want to take sides.

That rule is asserting itself today in the debate over reforming the health care system, much as it did in the debate over Social Security a few years ago.

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