Trump administration blasts CBO ahead of critical report this week

Trump, White House aides, and Republican allies in Congress are in full-blown sales-pitch mode trying to promote the GOP plan to repeal and replace President Obama’s signature legislative achievement. The new bill is already facing pushback, and not just from Democrats. Democrats have been known to argue with the CBO as well: Obama’s White House challenged the agency’s 2014 assessment that an increase in the minimum wage would reduce jobs.

The meeting, held with a group of Americans who had been hurt by the increasing costs of Obamacare, comes as Trump and Republicans try to build support for the AHCA after early criticisms from across the political spectrum.

Conservative Republicans however say the bill drafted by House leaders is too expensive, and too much like the Democratic bill it aims to replace.

One of the participants in the listening session was Brittany Ivey of Georgia, who said her insurance premiums started at $650 per month in 2009 for her family of four, “but from 2009 to 2015, [it] went up 102%”.

A report by the Commonwealth Fund nonpartisan foundation said the CBO was “reasonably accurate” in its forecast of how Obamacare would impact insurance coverage rates and the costs of providing subsidies to consumers in its first five years.

“Nobody will be worse off financially in the process that we’re going through”, Price said in an interview aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press”. He said the House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce Committees should have waited for the CBO score before advancing the legislation last week. “If you’re looking to the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place”, White House spokesman Sean Spicer inveighed. Previous administrations, as well as many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, consider the CBO as a neutral arbiter. The CBO’s current director, Keith Hall, was appointed by Republicans in 2015. The nonpartisan report will include an estimate of the law’s cost and statistics on how many Americans will lose coverage under the new plan.

Republicans have pushed back on those charges, but they released their bill only after restricting access to it, and roughly 40 hours before their markups started, and before there was a CBO score.

In recent weeks, Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers have criticized what they said were overly optimistic estimates from the CBO of the number of Americans who would sign up for health insurance on government-run exchanges. Price on Sunday rejected one estimate of 15 million people losing coverage. He said people will have choices as they select the kind of coverage they want as opposed to what the government forces them to buy.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said he fully expects the CBO analysis to find less coverage since the GOP plan eliminates the government requirement to be insured. House conservatives vowed to block the bill as “Obamacare Lite” unless there are more restrictions, even as a Republican, Sen. They claim the plan will provide Americans with better coverage, even though several organisations have predicted that many people, especially supporters of Mr Trump, are likely to suffer.