Sen. David Perdue Questions CBO About Their Faulty Analysis, Bias in Favor of Obamacare

Obamacare Here Sign Joe Raedle Getty
Joe Raedle/Getty

Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) questioned the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) political bias during a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Wednesday.

Sen. Perdue asked Dr. Keith Hall, the director of the CBO, at the Senate Budget Committee hearing on Wednesday:

It’s one thing to disagree with the projection. It’s another thing to look at reality and compare it back to the projections, which is what we do in the real world in business. In 2013, CBO predicted that Obamacare enrollment in the individual market would be for the years 2015, 2016, and 2017 would be 13M, 24M, and 26M people, respectively. The actual enrollment was 11M, 12M, and 10M. When you see 100% error like that, it raises questions in my mind about impartiality. Particularly when the author of those estimates, the head of the CBO’s Analysis Group was formerly the head of Hillary Clinton’s 1993 Health Care Task Force. I have to ask the question: Going forward, how do we assure ourselves that we’re getting a non-partisan, objective viewpoint?”

Hall responded, “We do a lot to seek guidance from experts in both sides. We actually do our best to go back and look and how we did. We went back and look at how we did. Certainly, with the exchanges, we were off.”

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney also attacked the CBO for their partisan links. Holly Harvey, who runs the CBO’s health analysis agency division, ran Hillary Clinton’s 1993 Health Care Task Force.

Mulvaney asked, “We always talk about it as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Given the authority that that has, is it really feasible to think of that as a nonpartisan organization?”

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC) has also disputed the CBO’s analysis of Obamacare as well as the dramatic analyses of several Obamacare repeal bill bills, including the House-passed American Health Care Act (AHCA).

Meadows told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview:

The CBO report needs to be put in context. This is the same CBO that projected that twice the amount of people would be on Obamacare now as they are now. These are the same people that said that 23 million people would lose their health care in the individual markets when only 9.3 million of them have only signed up to date. So they actually have more people losing health care coverage than they actually have people signed up today. So the 23 million Americans that would lose coverage is actually based on an inflated estimate that we never achieved and to put it in context there’s 9.3 million in the individual market and another large group in the Medicaid market. In truth, allowing greater flexibility and allowing prices to come down will provide a better coverage and provide an opportunity for many people to quit making decisions between their mortgage payment and their insurance payment. The estimates are not based on sound math, they’re based on D.C. math which I’ve found to be very problematic over time.

The CBO director then proceeded to give three separate excuses as to why the CBO’s projection of Obamacare enrollment numbers did not match reality.

Dr. Hall said, “Everybody else was [off] as well,” “We were probably more accurate than most others,” and “We were consistently overestimating the exchange participation.”

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