Amid all the flurry of news in the hectic last days before the House recessed for the August break, something important went largely unnoticed — a development that should be the knockout blow to the kind of sweeping health-care bill the Obama administration is pushing, at least as it has been cobbled together in the House.
In a July 26 letter to the Ranking Republicans on four key committees (Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, Education and Labor, and Budget), the Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Doug Elmendorf, made it clearer than he ever had before that the bill, in its original July 14 form, would dramatically widen the already large gap between long-term government revenue and spending. Here’s the key paragraph:
Looking ahead to the decade beyond 2019, CBO tries to evaluate the rate at which the budgetary impact of each of those broad categories would be likely to change over time. The net cost of the coverage provisions would be growing at a rate of more than 8 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019; we would anticipate a similar trend in the subsequent decade. The reductions in direct spending would also be larger in the second decade than in the first, and they would represent an increasing share of spending on Medicare over that period; however, they would be much smaller at the end of the 10-year budget window than the cost of the coverage provisions, so they would not be likely to keep pace in dollar terms with the rising cost of the coverage expansion. Revenue from the surcharge on high-income individuals would be growing at about 5 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019; that component would continue to grow at a slower rate than the cost of the coverage expansion in the following decade. In sum, relative to current law, the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window.
In other words, CBO expects the spending in the bill would grow at a rate of least 8 percent annually into the indefinite future, while the revenue to pay for it will only grow at about 5 per cent per year. Hence the “substantial increases” in federal budget deficits beyond 2019.
Although CBO declined to specify any actual deficit numbers beyond 2019, they can be easily calculated, in rough terms, from the information provided in Elmendorf’s letter.
By 2030, if the spending associated with the coverage provisions rises 8 percent per year after 2019 and the revenue rises by 5 percent, the bill would add more than $200 billion per year to currently projected budget deficits. By 2048, the annual deficit increase would top $1 trillion — and only go up from there.
Of course, the federal government is already in a deep hole due to the projected rapid cost increases in Social Security and Medicare. The trustees for those programs reported earlier this year (see here and here) that Social Security’s seventy-five year unfunded liability stands at $5 trillion, while Medicare’s has reached at an astounding $36 trillion.
It is possible to do a similar “unfunded liability” calculation for the new entitlement spending in the House bill. Assuming a discount rate of 5.7 percent per year, the bill would add more than $10 trillion over seventy-five years in new unfunded government obligations.
Of course, some amendments were adopted to assuage the Blue Dogs in the Energy and Commerce Committee. The fate of those amendments is uncertain at best, however, as Speaker Pelosi has indicated the contents of the yet-to-be-written merged bill from the three committees will be decided later (to attract votes of course). But even if the Blue Dog amendments survive, they would do very little to change the basic direction of the bill’s long-term costs.
CBO recently projected that the federal budget deficit is already on track to reach nearly 15 percent of GDP in 2035, well above the historical average of about 2 to 2.5 percent. The last thing Congress should be doing is making the problem worse with new runaway costs. Indeed, the president himself has said he won’t accept a bill that makes our long-term budget problem worse. How he squares that with full support for the emerging House bill is anybody’s guess.