Do the problems in the ACA stem from the so-called 10-6 dodge? I don’t believe so. But Ezra has written a useful post noting some of the flaws in the 10-6 dodge criticisms of the health bill.

Republicans now believe that saving money in order to offset the cost of purchasing something is some sort of trick, where it used to just be responsible budgeting.

I think that Republicans are concerned about evaluating the budgetary impact of a stylized portrait of legislation in isolation from other aspects of the alternative baseline, including the revenue losses associated with extending large swathes of the Bush tax cut and fixing the Medicare SGR. Revenue gains from the CLASS Act premiums and student loan reforms were applied to lower the cost of the new health legislation rather than to offset built-in spending increases.Given the fact that the president has pledged not to raise the taxes of under-$250,000 households, these are among the few revenue-enhancing options available to him, which raises all kinds of questions. Whether or not this is a “trick,” it does seem worthy of note.

And of course it’s not just Republicans who are concerned about this brand of responsible budgeting. John Cassidy of The New Yorker, known for his rabid hostility to the welfare state and his love of Sarah Palin and all things Tea Party (I kid), has raised many of the same concerns rather persuasively.

Democrats did engage in budget gimmickry by pushing the beginning of the bill back to 2014. But the gimmick wasn’t that they were raising lots of money in the early years in order to offset the cost of the later years. It was that they wanted to keep the bill’s 10-year price tag under $1 trillion, and by starting the bill in 2014 — which is only six years away from the end of the 10-year budget window — that gave them room for higher annual spending than if they’d started the bill in 2011 and had to spread the spending across nine years.

I imagine that conservatives would happily embrace this characterization.

That was a trick, and one I opposed. But there’s no “10-6 dodge.” Indeed, the bill saves much more money in the second decade than in the first. The cuts and revenue, in other words, aren’t front-loaded. If anything, they’re back-loaded.

Again, I get the strong impression that NR-readers would enthusiastically endorse this characterization: the cuts and the tax increases are indeed back-loaded — the pain is delayed. This is indeed one of the central objections raised by conservatives.

One potential problem with Ezra’s approach is illustrated in another post:

I spent 2009 and the beginning of 2010 reporting on health-care reform. I talked to a lot of experts and a lot of Hill and administration sources. And they were all pretty much interchangeable. Whether it was George W. Bush’s CMS Director Mark McClellan or President Obama’s OMB Director Peter Orszag or Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown or the New America Foundation’s Len Nichols, the verdict was always pretty much the same: This is a good bill.

I actually don’t think that Ezra is doing justice to his own work. He talked to many other experts who were sharply critical of the bill. I believe that the list is meant to reflect a wide range of opinion, yet my sense is that the range is in fact fairly narrow. James Capretta, the PAD at OMB who oversaw entitlement programs, a role that gave him a great deal of insight into the relevant issues, had a very different take, as did many other experts from the left and right.