I previously posted about a recent report by the Office of Medicare Actuary which found that Obamacare would increase costs, and that the final health care bill made numerous unrealistic cost assumptions.
I also made the follow observation as to why the report came out so late:
Now it makes sense. The Democrats refused to delay the vote on Obamacare even though the Medicare Actuary was not able to complete his analysis and cost estimates in time for the vote. In light of this report, it is clear why the Democrats didn’t want to wait. They could game the CBO, but not the Medicaire Actuary.
I may have been wrong in giving Democrats the benefit of the doubt as to the vote being rushed prior to the report. The vote may not have been rushed to avoid the completion of the report, the report may have been completed but withheld from the public.
According to this article (via David Freddoso), the report was completed prior to the vote, but held back to avoid the obvious problem with a report which questioned the political sales pitch and the plausibility of the CBO scoring:
The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama’s health care “reform” law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.
“The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote,” says an HHS source. “Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think.”
If accurate, this reflects a level of cynicism and deceit beyond what even I had attributed to the Democrats.
I’ll be interested to hear Sebelius go on record about this.
Update: The Office of Medicare Actuary denies any delay in the release of the report.
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