The Note: The dispute over the CBO health care report snowballs

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March 14, 2017

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The dispute over the CBO health care report snowballs

The Big Story

There hasn't been a CBO score this hotly anticipated since, well, the last time Congress was poised to act on a major health care overhaul. While the Trump administration is setting things up to basically ignore it – hello, "alternative facts" – there are other realities that will be impossible to ignore. With town-hall heat continuing, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas – no squishy moderate – came up with a catchy and stark warning about electoral consequences, raising the possibility of losing control of Congress next year: "Do not walk the plank and vote for a bill that cannot pass the Senate and then have to face the consequences of that vote," Cotton said on ABC News' "This Week" Sunday. Then there is President Trump's "insurance for everybody" promise, and related guarantees that will be as impossible to keep as President Obama's much-maligned statement that you could keep your doctor. "I firmly believe that nobody will be worse off financially in the process that we're going through," Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said Sunday. House Speaker Paul Ryan wouldn't even go there when asked how many people would lose coverage: "I can't answer that question," the Wisconsin Republican said.

The Sleeper Story

In the odd story of president-on-president accusations, a clarifying moment from White House press secretary Sean Spicer about the actual views of President Trump: "He doesn't really think that President Obama went up and tapped his phone personally." Then came some more news – in the form of a rare White House walk-back of Trump's own tweeted remarks: "The president used the word 'wiretapped' in quotes to mean, broadly, surveillance and other activities," Spicer said. To quote one of the tweets in question: "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!" It doesn't take Inspector Gadget to figure out where this is most likely headed: toward the president being able to say he was right all along, when he appears to have been wrong and-or intentionally misleading from the start. The parsing makes congressional oversight – which Trump, of course, has called for, apparently to help bail himself out – more urgent.

The Shiny Story

Maybe the new reality show can replace "The Bachelor": Where will the president's salary go? Spicer said Monday that the president's "intention" is to donate his salary to charity at the end of the year, and said he would be looking to the White House press corps to decide where his $400,000 should go. Well, start with this: Trump long promised not to take a salary at all as president, which is different than donating to charity. "If I'm elected president, I'm accepting no salary, OK?" Trump said on the campaign trail in New Hampshire. "I'm not going to take the salary. I'm not taking it," he told "60 Minutes" as president-elect. As for deciding for him on charities, this is not a game that would most likely end well for the press. And as if the president needs reminding, quite a few reporters spent very many hours trying to verify just the donations he claimed to have made over a period of decades. One way to verify his money goes where he says it will? The president could release his tax returns.

TLDR

The CBO report released Monday shows that by 2026 about 52 million people are estimated not to have insurance and those numbers are driving some enormous push back on both sides of the aisle.