The assertion that, according to the CBO, health-care reform will reduce the federal budget deficit leads the House Democrats’ talking points regarding their not-yet-unveiled bill. Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown simply passes them along: “Cuts the deficit by $1.2 trillion in the second ten years.” So does the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, reporting a $1.3 trillion deficit reduction in that period.
The problem is, the CBO estimate released today does not include the $1.2 trillion number. CBO provides numbers for the initial ten years. That’s their job. Beyond that, they provide no point estimates. Savings during the 2020–2029 period would fall in a “broad range around one-half percent of GDP”; presumably, the Democrats extrapolated from this number to arrive at $1.2 trillion. But such an exact estimate can’t be given because, as CBO notes, “The imprecision of that calculation reflects the even greater degree of uncertainty that attends to it, compared with CBO’s 10-year budget estimates.”