We were one month deeper into the 2009 health care debate than we are into the current one when a development that seems quaint by today’s standards nearly derailed the whole process.

“I’m going to really put you on the spot,” Senator Kent Conrad, the Democratic chairman of the budget committee at the time, asked Doug Elmendorf, then the director of the Congressional Budget Office. “From what you have seen from the products of the committees that have reported, do you see a successful effort being mounted to bend the long-term cost curve?”

Elmendorf answered, “No, Mr. Chairman.”

For the most part, the only people who will remember this exchange are reporters who covered the Obamacare legislative process, and an assortment of other wonks and nerds, but it is no exaggeration to say Elmendorf’s unassuming testimony rocked Capitol Hill and threw the fate of health care reform (not for the first time or the last) into doubt. The Washington Post called it a “devastating assessment … of the heath-care proposals drafted by congressional Democrats.” Soon, the White House’s frustration with the CBO’s pronouncements spilled out into a very public fight.

Today it is impossible to imagine Republicans inviting the CBO director to a public hearing to testify about the American Health Care Act. Republicans consider it a matter of great urgency that they pass a bill with minimal public scrutiny before the July 4 recess. They intend to release a bill text Thursday and hold a final vote within a week, with no hearings in between. It is even further-fetched to imagine Republicans imperiling the bill’s odds of passage by exposing it to constant public scrutiny for a full year, as Democrats did with the Affordable Care Act.