Much of this was originally posted as a comment to one of Paul Rosenberg's earlier diaries but it really deserves its own diary.
In assuming that the Public Option is not going to pass, I continue to look for ways of extending the fight and not letting it die, continuing to press the issues which divide us from traditional Democrats.
One such issue, I think is the role played by the Congressional Budget Office in this fight. Prior to this fight who outside the beltway had ever heard of the CBO? But at every point, the CBO was brought it to give a supposedly impartial numbers-only score to any proposal contemplated by either House. I argue below the jump that they were not impartial, they represented the point of view of the Insurance Industry, that this needs to be confronted in future battles, and that it's possible to do so.
Whatever biases the CBO brought to the task were not examined, and they should be, going forward. In my opinion they revealingly tipped their hand in the latest phase when they declared, seemingly out of the blue, that Harry Reid's proposal that private insurers adhere to a 90% "medical loss ratio" (in other words, administrative costs + profit could not exceed 10% of revenue) effectively would make private insurers a "government program" and that therefore its revenues and expenditures should be added to the federal budget deficit in calculations. This dictum effectively killed the provision as long as Obama's rule that HCR must be deficit-neutral remained in effect, and Reid quickly amended the proposal to demand only an 85% "medical loss ratio."
What the hell does this mean? Where did CBO come up with the 90% figure? (An old friend of mine would have called this "state of the art rectal extrapolation".) It makes no sense, but we have to try to understand it anyway. The only way it makes any sense is that the CBO's calculations betray an inherent bias in favor of allowing private insurers to continue to extract the minimum rate of profit they are willing to accept. It implicitly accepts the notion that private industries cannot compete with government programs, budget be damned! (Wasn't budget the whole point of the CBO?) It's a built-in bias that rules off limits the progressive solutions (Public Option and Single Payer) to the very problem that we progressives are trying to solve - which are the best solutions from a budgetary point of view. If these guys are setting the rules, we never had a chance, and won't have a chance in the future unless we challenge it. It's interesting that Congress's impartial Budgetary arm would brazenly expose such biases.
This is a far cry from the "just the facts, ma'am" image that has been granted to the CBO.
I think this is a meaty bone for some Congressional back-bencher and ongoing movements to pursue. In making this assessment the CBO exposed itself as a non-neutral tool of the existing powers that Congress is supposed to control.
In any future battles involving the budget it will be important to keep the CBO in check. They are nothing but Wall St.'s guard dog.
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