Latest on health care proposals here.

Hammering the last nail into the "savings down the road" lie (boldface mine).

Longer-Term Costs of the Proposal

Estimating the effects of major changes to the health care and health insurance systems over the next 10 years is very difficult and involves substantial uncertainty; generating longer-term estimates is even more challenging and is fraught with even greater uncertainty. As a result, CBO does not provide formal cost estimates beyond the 10-year budget window. However, we have said that in evaluating proposals to reform health care, the agency will endeavor to offer a qualitative indication of whether they would be more likely to increase or decrease the budget deficit over the second decade.

The starting point for such an analysis of the recent House proposal is our estimate of the proposal’s impact on the federal budget deficit in the first 10 years. As discussed in CBO’s letter of July 17, we estimate that the proposal as a whole would increase federal deficits by $239 billion over the 2010–2019 period. That estimate has three major components: the net effect of the coverage specifications, which affect both spending and revenues and which would add an estimated $1,042 billion to cumulative deficits over that period; the effect of other provisions, primarily regarding Medicare, that would reduce direct spending by a net $219 billion; and the effect of still other provisions (primarily, an income tax surcharge on high-income individuals) that would increase revenues by $583 billion. Under the proposal, federal spending on health care would increase by approximately the difference between the net cost of the coverage specifications and the reductions in direct spending.

Looking ahead to the decade beyond 2019, CBO tries to evaluate the rate at which the budgetary impact of each of those broad categories would be likely to change over time. The net cost of the coverage provisions would be growing at a rate of more than 8 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019; we would anticipate a similar trend in the subsequent decade. The reductions in direct spending would also be larger in the second decade than in the first, and they would represent an increasing share of spending on Medicare over that period; however, they would be much smaller at the end of the 10-year budget window than the cost of the coverage provisions, so they would not be likely to keep pace in dollar terms with the rising cost of the coverage expansion. Revenue from the surcharge on high-income individuals would be growing at about 5 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019; that component would continue to grow at a slower rate than the cost of the coverage expansion in the following decade.

In sum, relative to current law, the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window.