CBO scare tactic on Obamacare Individual mandate

turned out to be as wrong as critics suggested

This seems to be a recurring theme with the CBO. The CBO is tasked to provide insight for Congress, but time and time again these reports sounds more like a Democrat talking point than objective analysis. Whether it be the underlying assumption that tax cuts never produce any economic stimulus, or the assumption that government spending will always provide a multi-layered multiplier for how much economic impact government spending produces.

But never has the CBO been more wrong than dealing with their analysis of the Affordable Health Care Act.  The fact that you can task the CBO with predicting how many people would be signing up is bad enough. The fact that you continue to task them with this job, after being dead wrong over and over just rubs salt in the wound.

But one of the most blatant so called analysis was the CBO doomsday predictions about how many people would lose coverage if we repealed Obamacare. Now these numbers were generally bundled together (likely for purposes of political gaslighting) but were almost exclusively driven by their prediction of a mass exodus of people who would stop buying coverage if the individual mandate was repealed.

The analysis was so ridiculous that the CBO actually predicted that millions of Americans would opt out of free insurance like Medicaid if not for the mandate to have insurance. The final tally put forth by the CBO was that if we repealed the Individual mandate that 14 million Americans would "lose insurance" by the end of 2018. Losing insurance, of course, meant that people would choose not to purchase it.

So where are we at? According to the Health and Human Services, there are approximately 2.5 million people who ACTUALLY dropped their insurance in the aftermath of repealing the individual mandate. That falls far short of the 14 million predicted. Moreover, the HHS is predicting very little impact moving forward, whereas the CBO continued to believe that people would either drop or opt out of insurance year after year.

It would appear that the CBO overestated this number by a cool 560%.

Where else (other than the Government) can you continue to be this wrong? Where else (other than the Democratic Party) will you see people rushing again and again to defend an organization that is wrong more often than they are right.

Time to disband the CBO once and for all and actually create a non-political organization with people who are professional, objective, non-political, and ultimately accountable for errors.