GOP health bill savings estimate lowered from $4.4 B to $0.5 B

Bad news, Righties: while the CBO has previously estimated that the Republican House health care bill would save $4.4 billion from fraud enforcement, they’ve come back and corrected their numbers. Looks like your health bill is no solution after all:

The HCFAC funding at issue is $266 million a year of direct spending under current law. CBO’s earlier understanding was that the intent was to increase funding by $300 million a year, for a gross direct spending cost of $3 billion over 10 years. As drafted, however, the substitute amendment has the effect of setting (and freezing) HCFAC funding at exactly $300m a year. In other words, the language as drafted would increase funding by $34 million a year, or approximately $0.3 billion over 10 years (not the $3 billion). As noted above, our original estimate shows an increase in direct spending of $3.0 billion over 10 years. With that level of funding, we estimated nonscoreable savings of $4.4 billion over the budget window. (Those savings are “nonscoreable” because Scorekeeping Guideline #14, as adopted by the Congress several years ago, specifies that any estimated reductions in direct spending or increases in revenues that stem from direct spending for program administration purposes cannot be counted for purposes of budget enforcement.)

The corrected estimate, to reflect the language as drafted, is an increase in direct spending of $0.3 billion over 10 years. With that change in HCFAC funding, we estimate nonscoreable savings of $0.5 billion over 10 years. The net result of that correction is to increase the net pay-as-you-go savings of the Boehner substitute by about $2.7 billion (by removing $3 billion in direct spending cost and adding back in $0.3 billion). Because of Scorekeeping Guideline #14, the change in nonscoreable savings does not affect the tally of direct spending for budget enforcement purposes.

But really… did anyone expect a solution out of the No Party?