With new legislation recently released and estimated in the Senate, US BudgetWatch has updated the health care comparison charts and graphs. In this version, we compare, on a number of metrics, the bill being considered in the Senate to the legislation which recently passed the House.

Click here to download the previous version of these charts, which compared the (now-passed) plan put forward by the House Democrats to the House Republican plan and the Senate Finance Committee legislation.

Building on Comparing Health Care Plans, this paper goes beyond simply describing the Senate HELP bill, the House Tri-Committee bill, and the amended Senate Finance bill to offer detailed analysis on their key costs, deficit impacts, and long-term fiscal implications.

While there is broad agreement that health reform is necessary, there is little consensus on what changes are needed. To help the public understand the health care reform debate, this paper focuses on the ten-year costs and savings under the major provisions of the Senate HELP Committee bill, the Finance Committee bill, and the House Tri-Committee bill.  

UPDATE: See the latest cost and savings estimates of the amended Finance bill here.

The CBO recently projected a ten-year deficit of $7.1 trillion using a "current law" baseline. But these numbers may prove to be optimistic. CRFB argues that  four major assumptions in the baseline are unlikely to materialize, leading to a ten-year deficit of $12.6 trillion. This paper discusses US Budget Watch's own "current policy" baseline, which assumes particular policies do not conform to current law.

One of President Obama’s central campaign promises was to reform the national health care system. Existing plans to do so, however, are likely to cost between $1 trillion and $2 trillion over the next decade.  In "Options to Pay for Health Care Reform," US Budget Watch offers over 60 tax and spending options which could help pay for the costs of health care reform.

Recently, the White House released its comprehensive FY2010 budget request, including detailed proposals for each agency, along with “Analytical Perspectives,” a description of all proposed spending cuts and program eliminations, and an updated set of summary tables. Also released was the Treasury Department’s “Green Book,” which compiles all tax proposals within the budget. This paper analyses those documents.

 Last week, the Budget Committees in both the House and Senate reported out their respective versions of the Budget Resolution, to be considered on the House and Senate floors.  While each resolution would result in smaller deficit than would the President’s Budget, as estimated by the CBO, we worry that both resolutions contain a number of assumptions that may be difficult to achieve.

Last week, the CBO released its Preliminary Analysis of The President’s Budget, projecting a significantly worse fiscal situation than the Administration does. The cumulative deficit numbers from the CBO over the 2010-2019 period are over $2.2 trillion greater than those from OMB.  

Although CRFB commends the President for having a specific fiscal goal and for honestly budgeting for expected costs, several items and trends in the budget are troubling. This paper focuses on three main issues: a more aggressive deficit goal would be appropriate; introducing new spending programs and tax cuts before finding ways to close the fiscal gap threatens the principle that Congress set forth to fully offset all new initiatives; and the budget largely fails to address the long-term.

Today, the White House released an outline of the FY2010 Budget. The President’s budget has a specific fiscal goal, accounts for policies omitted by previous budgets, and proposes to fully offset new tax cut and health care plans. This paper analyzes the fiscal goals, baseline figures, health care reform, and the budget process elements of the President’s budget outline.