Peter Suderman on How the Federal Government Has Made It Harder to Measure Obamacare’s Results

In
September 2009, when President Obama made a primetime speech
pitching his not-yet-passed health care overhaul, he made the
following promise: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to
our deficits—either now or in the future. Period.” To prove his
seriousness, he further promised that “there will be a provision in
this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts
if the savings we promised don’t materialize.”

The promise of deficit reduction was repeated over and over in
the months before the bill became law, and it was central to
Obamacare’s passage. Congressional Democrats would likely not have
voted to pass it had the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) not
scored the bill as a net reduction in the nation’s deficits. Yet
earlier this month, the CBO, which provided the original estimate
and evidence that the law would be deficit neutral, said that it
can no longer score the net fiscal effect of the law in its
entirety.

Indeed, there’s a lot that will be tough to know about
Obamacare, both now and in the future—and it’s not just because of
the CBO. Over the last few months, a series of reporting and
measurement changes from a variety of government agencies have made
it vastly more difficult to usefully measure the law’s outcomes. A
law as sprawling and complex as Obamacare was always going to be a
challenge to measure, writes Reason Senior Editor Peter
Suderman. And these decisions have made it harder still.

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