Who Is Keeping The CBO's Public Plan Estimates Secret?

By Jonathan Walker

Created 07/24/2009 - 7:19pm

The House's bill contains a public option that would pay a Medicare rates plus 5%. According to the CBO [1] this will make the House's public plan roughly 10% cheaper than private insurance. Since the size of subsidies are based on the average of the three cheapest plans it should dramatically reduce the cost of the bill.

Over a week ago Jonathan Cohn [2] at New Republic was leaked a report that the House's public plan would reduce the cost of the bill by roughly $150 billion. The official bill has been out for days and the CBO must have evaluated the potential savings from the public plan. Yet no estimates have been released. Someone is purposely hiding the cost savings from the public plan.