CBO Messes Up Wyden's Amendment

Sen. Ron Wyden is considered to be a health care policy wonk. He ranks among only a handful of senators who have dedicated years to studying how best to overhaul our broken health care system. His primary goal is to provide greater choice to Americans in what health insurance they have.

To achieve his goal he created his “free choice” amendment which would have allowed individuals to get a voucher equal to the cost of their employer-provided health insurance. They would take this voucher and use it to buy insurance on the new exchanges.

Sen. Wyden was not happy, while in the course of debating his amendment, he was informed that the CBO “somehow” only scored one small part of his amendment. To say this is incredibly unusual would be an understatement.

Independent analysis by the Lewin Group predicted that Wyden's free choice proposal would generate $129.8 billion in revenue for the government. The incomplete/incorret CBO score said the amendment would only save $1 billion.