CBO Number is In

But don't let it fool you:

Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says the CBO has scored the latest version of the Democrats' health-care bill, reporting its cost at $940 billion over the first ten years.

Based on funding formulas similar to those provided by Democrats on earlier versions of the bill — presumably complete with frontloaded taxation, Medicare double-counting and the like — the CBO says the bill will cut deficits by $130 billion in that time.

We still don't know just what's in the bill, nor what they did yesterday to massage the numbers below $1 trillion. Of course, any "savings" are realized by collecting taxes immediately while waiting for several years to start benefits. It's pretty easy to make it look better than it really is this way.

Michelle Malkin tweets this:

Democrat Clyburn: "We are absolutely giddy" over CBO numbers. "Giddy" over nearly $1 billion pricetag. Whee!

Unfortunately, a number below $1 trillion will give some Dems an excuse to vote for it.

Philip Klein as questions:

The details of the Congressional Budget Office estimates are starting to leak. While we don't have the full numbers yet, Talking Points Memo reports, citing a Democratic source, that the price tag will be $940 billion from 2010 through 2019 -- with $130 billion in deficit reduction during that period.

Since we don't have the actual score yet, we don't know which gimmicks Democrats employed to get the number they wanted. As we know, the CBO scores kept getting delayed so that Democrats could tweak the bill to meet their targets. We can only assume that they employed many of the same tactics as in earlier versions of the legislation, such as delaying the major spending provisions until 2014, thus disguising the true 10 year cost once fully implemented.

From a policy perspective, the big question is where all the new money came from. Based on what we know from prior CBO data, delaying the "Cadillac Tax" until 2018 -- as President Obama proposed -- would represent a revenue loss of $85 billion (see chart on page 9 of this PDF). If the bill also costs $65 billion more than the Senate version and deficit reduction is roughly constant, it means that Democrats needed to find $140 billion from somewhere. What combination of spending cuts, or more likely, tax increases, did they use to get there?

It now looks like the vote will come Sunday.

UPDATE: Philip Klein adds this via Twitter:

CBO: HC bills would cost $17 billion in first 4 years, $923 billion in remaining 6 years!