Sen. Mike Lee has grown tired of the Congressional Budget Office's "secret formula" that has produced inaccurate models yet insists on its work being regarded like the 10 commandments.
No more, the Utah Republican wrote in a column for the Washington Examiner; it's time for the CBO to start showing its work.
"That is why I have introduced the 'CBO Show Your Work Act of 2017.' This bill would require the CBO to publish its data, models, and all details of computation used in its cost analysis and scoring," Lee wrote.
Lee's had enough of an office that has at least twice been off its healthcare projections by 100 percent.
"Congress does need a scorekeeper to provide budgetary estimates for the policy changes it considers. But at a bare minimum, that scorekeeper should be forced to show how its models work. Currently the CBO doesn't have to do that," Lee wrote in the Examiner.
"It's a 'black box,' a secret formula even Congress can't be allowed to see, yet which the House and Senate must treat as if they were handed down on stone tablets at Mt. Sinai," Lee writes. "It's an indefensible situation."
The final straw for Lee — CBO projected that "7 million people would abandon their Medicaid coverage" just by Congress repealing the individual mandate without a "single dime's worth of cuts to Medicaid."
"There are good reasons to be skeptical of the quality of healthcare that lower-income Americans receive through Medicaid, but why would 7 million voluntarily give up Medicaid coverage they receive for free? These CBO projections, and others like it, strain the boundaries of common sense," Lee wrote.
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