Shooting the Messenger: CBO in the Crosshairs

Over at AEI's blog, I talk about a new theme in the healthcare debate: criticizing the Congressional Budget Office for not crediting the Obama administration's proposed reforms with significant health care savings. I argue that CBO's skepticism of the cost-saving potential of reforms such as comparative effectiveness research, disease management and healthcare information technology is probably well-founded and their focus on getting the incentives right makes sense. Instead of bashing the CBO, health reformers on the left should think harder about setting up incentives so that the reforms mentioned above would actually save significant money.