Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
A Look At Why CBO Changed Its Projections About The Individual Mandate: It Was Trying To Predict Human Behavior
The Washington Post Fact Checker does a deep dive on the context surrounding the Congressional Budget Office's projections on how getting rid of the individual mandate would affect the marketplace.
Policymaking in Washington can live and die by 鈥渢he baseline鈥 鈥 in particular, the baseline set by the Congressional Budget Office. During the debate over the 2017 Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Democrats often cited estimates that the repeal would result in 23 million fewer people having health insurance within a decade. That number came from the CBO鈥檚 estimate of the impact of the law versus what it predicted would happen under existing policy 鈥 i.e., 鈥渢he baseline.鈥 The big part of the change was because the law proposed to repeal the mandate that individuals must be insured. (Kessler, 2/26)
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