The CBO has released their score on the potential repeal of Obamacare. According to them millions of people would lose their health insurance and costs for premiums would rise. Democrats are upset that Republicans don’t believe the numbers. This is because the numbers do not make logical sense. People have an inherent bullshit detector that can tell when they are being lied to or when certain facts are hidden. For instance for the year leading up to the election economists, the Obama admin, and the mainstream media has been telling people that we are at full employment. No one believed them and people elected Trump instead as well as giving historic majorities to Republicans. When you tell people there is full employment they expect that their wages would go up as well as there would be more competition for limited labor. When that did not happen people figured out it was a lie.

Logic

The CBO fails using the same logical standards. The entire reason Obamacare exists is to give people with preexisting conditions insurance. By definition people with preexisting conditions are sicker than the general population. Which is why insurance did not want to work with them in the first place. If you include them in the calculations then everyone has to pay higher premiums to keep the plans solvent. If you remove them from the calculations, like for example by repealing Obamacare, then the premium everyone else pays would get lower as a result.

Benefit of the Doubt

If you read the reports prepared by the CBO on both Obamacare and its repeal you can see why they make this error. Every projection and fact given by the Obama administration was treated as gospel truth and the CBO based their score on this. Since they were heavily biased towards the Obama administration the report they published was proven to be wrong. In contrast the CBO disagrees with everyone of the assumptions used by the Trump administration when it formulated its bill and repeal.

The proof is in the report itself. Hidden deep within the report is an admission that the only reason a lot of people would lose insurance is because they were forced into it in the first place by the individual mandate. If they were not forced to buy the insurance they would not purchase it because of the high premiums. If this were Obama they would have then stipulated that the people who lost the insurance voluntarily would have found their own insurance which would be at a lower cost than obamacare because there would be no one with preexisting conditions driving up the cost.

If you haven’t figured it out yet the CBO decides whether it supports a bill or not and then makes up assumptions to provide the data to reach its predetermined conclusion.

Bias

At this point in time Republicans would be crying about the CBO being biased towards the Democrats. That’s not exactly true. The government will always be biased towards giving the government more power. People like George Washington who refuse power when handed to them are incredibly rare. This is why we have a hard time removing any regulations, even redundant ones. Take Dodd-Frank for example. By any objective standard it has failed to rein in big banks as they are four times as large now as they were when the regulation started now controlling nearly half the entire banking industry. Yet government still rates it favorably.

Like any living organism government will protect itself. It will always tell you that it is needed and needs to be expanded. It is up to we the people to hold our elected representatives to their promises.