Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) requested on Tuesday that members of the Senate Finance Committee hearing investigate discrepancies between the Congressional Budget Office’s original cost estimates for the Affordable Care Act and its latest estimates.
In a letter to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Ron Wyden (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Roberts requested that the committee investigate why the CBO’s recent projection that the healthcare law will cost $2 trillion is more than double its original estimation.
“We rely on CBO to be a non-partisan resource for Congress, but we also depend on their projections to reflect a level of accuracy to allow us to make the best decisions on behalf of the people we serve,” Roberts said. “If the original estimates had contained the information in the most recent CBO projections, we might have been able to prevent the mess that is Obamacare today. At least the public would have had a much better understanding of the true costs, and I believe that would have impacted the debate.”
Roberts said legislators questioned the CBO’s original cost estimates because costs of related legislative actions such as efforts to reform Medicare’s sustainable growth rate were not included.
“…I believe CBO should explain the drastic difference between their earlier numbers and most recent projections and that the Finance Committee should examine ways to ensure transparent and accurate projections are presented for accompanying legislation in the future,” Roberts said.