CBO Undercut The SCOTUS Case Against O-Care 68 Times //TPM

CBO Undercut The SCOTUS Case Against O-Care 68 Times:
by Dylan Scott //Talking Points Memo

68. That's how many times the Congressional Budget Office, Capitol Hill's official scorekeeper, ran the numbers on Obamacare while the law was being drafted. And not once, according to a new analysis, did CBO officials give any credence to the legal challenge now being brought by the law's opponents.

In a review for the Scholars Strategy Network, Harvard University's Theda Skopcol scrutinized 68 reports that CBO released during the 2009 and 2010 debate. She was looking for any evidence that Congress intended for the law's subsidies to be available only on state-run exchanges, as the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell argue. If they prevail at the Supreme Court, health coverage for millions in the 36 states using the federal exchange would be at risk.

She didn't find any.

"Throughout hard-fought debates about health reform, lawmakers in both parties looked for ways to save taxpayer money," Skocpol wrote in the report, flagged by Vox's Sarah Kliff. "Partial subsidies would have greatly reduced costs, so the total absence of this kind of analysis among the 68 reports prepared by CBO for the 111th Congress (and its continuing absence in reports done by the next Congress) is the best objective evidence we have that no one in Congress considered premium subsidies restricted to certain states to be either possible or desirable.
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