United States Senator Jeff Sessions
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From time to time my office distributes press releases and written statements on state and national issues, debate in the Senate, and legislation that I am working on. For your convenience, I post these documents on my site for your review.
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Health Care: CBO Issues Important New Information
Regarding Debt Impact of Health Care Bill
Please click here to see the letter from the Congressional Budget Office.
Please click here to see the December 10, 2009, letter from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Please click here to see video of Sen. Sessions' press conference with Sens. Gregg and Kyl.
Please click here to see a chart regarding the flow of funds in the health care bill.
A clip of Sen. Sessions on FOX News may be found here.
Sessions' full statement may be found below:
“New information has come to light today that proves that claims by the President and supporters of the health care bill are false, and that, if passed, this legislation will add billions to the deficit.
“The President argued that this legislation would cut billions from Medicare, simultaneously expanding the program for nine additional years, and fully offsetting a spate of new government programs. In actuality, that is impossible. New information from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) proves that the deficit-neutral score is false, and is based on the Democrats’ use of clever manipulations of accounting rules.
“The CBO reported today:
The key point is that the savings to the HI trust fund under the [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs […] To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement of the government’s fiscal position.
“This statement from CBO is clear confirmation of a previous analysis from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which said,
The combination of lower Part A costs and higher tax revenues results in a lower federal deficit based on budget accounting rules. However, trust fund accounting considers the same lower expenditures and additional revenues as extending the exhaustion date of the Part A trust fund. In practice, the improved Part A financing cannot be simultaneously used to finance other Federal outlays (such as the coverage expansions under the PPACA) and to extend the trust fund, despite the appearance of this result from the respective accounting conventions.
“This conclusively shows that the legislation is not deficit neutral, and is only made to appear so by counting the same money twice. In essence, the funding mechanism for much of the new spending is an intergovernmental loan that the bill drafters knew would not appear in the CBO score. Even so, the result is the same: taxpayers will be left holding billions in debt bonds to the Medicare trust fund that must be repaid.
“This dramatically contradicts assertions by President Obama and bill supporters that the bill ‘does not add one dime to the deficit.’ For those senators who have made deficit neutrality a condition of their support, the message is clear: You should rethink your position prior to today’s cloture vote.”
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