Accountability? We don’t need no stinkin’ accountability. From the Foundry, Obamacare Puts Transparency and Accountability on Death Bed
… The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the independent nonpartisan agency responsible for reviewing legislative initiatives with budgetary implications, has no idea what is in the legislation either. During yesterday’s Senate Finance Committee mark-up, the CBO realized only after the vote, that they had made a $600 million mistake in scoring an amendment by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI).
The issues that the CBO does not have enough information to analyze are not minor either. In letters released on September 22nd, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf told Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-IA) respectively that his agency simply had not been provided with sufficient legislative language and time to analyze whether insurance premiums would go up under Obamacare or how many unauthorized billions of dollars in health benefits illegal immigrants would receive…
And the Senate Democrats made sure that state of affairs will continue by defeating, almost entirely along party lines, an amendment that would have required that actual legislative text, as well as a final Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of the cost of the bill, be posted for 72 hours on the Senate Finance Committee website for public review before the Senate Finance Committee could vote on its final passage.
Other amendments attempting to protect citizens from adverse consequences of the bill were defeated:
* Sen. Cornyn (R-TX) offered an amendment that would have required the Secretary of HHS to certify that at least 75 percent of the physicians in the United States would accept Medicaid patients before the proposed mandatory Medicaid expansions are implemented. That amendment was defeated.
* Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) offered an amendment that would have required the Secretary of HHS to certify Obamacare would not cause more than 1,000,000 Americans to lose the current coverage of their choice. That amendment failed on a party line vote.
* Another Hatch amendment provided that if the Medicare funding reductions in the Medicare Advantage program were to result in a loss of benefits for seniors using Medicare Advantage, those provisions would be nullified. That amendment was also rejected.
More at the link.
Tags: Baucus, Healthcare Reform, Senate