Widely cited CBO scores have their shortcomings
Let's look closer at what CBO "scores" actually say and don't say. CBO doesn't look beyond immediate, first-order consequences of legislation. CBO doesn't take into account how people will adjust their private arrangements in response to publicpolicy changes. CBO technicians are loath to speculate what these adjustments might be, and rightfully so: because these involve thousands or millions of future private decisions. Unintended consequences, which are inevitable in major policy changes, are, by definition, unintended, and can't be foreseen with any degree of accuracy.
Suppose
CBO would duly write this up in acceptable bureaucratese. And the next morning's headlines would be (we're dead serious): "4 million black slaves to lose jobs." With the subhead: "Nonpartisan agency says starvation looms for thousands." No doubt there'd be a sidebar: "Anti-war senator calls Lincoln a murderer."
We know that, in the real world, this isn't at all what happened. Some ex-slaves ended up as paid laborers or sharecroppers with their old master. Some made arrangements with other employers. Some struck out on their own and moved from the South. The CBO's analysis that "4 million slaves will lose their current jobs" would be both technically correct and horribly wrong in its implications.
So it goes with health insurance. If we remove the penalty for not buying government-approved insurance, some people will not buy the insurance. But they won't be worse offnot buying a product they were forced to buy in the first place. Of course, being freed from the obligation to buy health insurance is hardly the moral equivalent of being freed from involuntary servitude, but the implications of CBO scoring are the same.?¢
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