Too often, politics devolves into just having the same arguments over and over again, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is more than willing to play into that dynamic. 

As Republicans work toward passing their reconciliation package, which will include tax increases and (hopefully) some spending cuts, the CBO is out with a new projection claiming that 13.7 million people will lose their health insurance if it passes. Naturally, left-wingers are latching onto the number, claiming it as proof of the GOP's hatred of the poor and working class. 

Hey America - while you were sleeping the Republicans started to put out their plan to rip health care away from millions of Americans. Almost 14 million people lose their health care so the GOP can fund tax cuts for the rich. https://t.co/RUZHoy02pG

— Neera Tanden🌻 (@neeratanden) May 12, 2025

For starters, the whole "tax cuts for the rich" thing is objectively false. Republicans have actually been (against their better judgment, in my opinion) considering tax increases for the rich. Further, the original Trump tax cuts gave over 80 percent of Americans a cut, and the other 20 percent essentially pay no federal income taxes anyway. Making those rates permanent is not a "tax cut for the rich," but it's not surprising someone as vapid and dishonest as Neera Tanden would run with that talking point. 

WATCH: Scott Jennings Becomes All Of Us, Torches Neera Tanden Over 'Accountability'

Regardless, whenever you see a projection from the CBO, it should be taken in the context of its past projections, and this topic holds a bit of a special place in my heart. The first article I ever wrote at RedState was on the CBO's Obamacare projections, how they purposely skewed them, and ended up laughably wrong in the end. 

Here's a bit of that original 2018 article, along with a follow-up in early 2020. 

SEE: Here's Just How Much the CBO Sucks At Projecting Things

Entirety of CBO coverage difference w/ACA & BCRA: BCRA's repeal of individual mandate & CBO's outdated baseline. https://t.co/evL8CdJN5Z pic.twitter.com/hqbKUDRycf

— Avik Roy (@Avik) July 22, 2017

What the above means is that CBO decided to try to grade the Obamacare repeal bill against already outdated and false projections they had made previously for Obamacare. They also made the ridiculous assumption that repealing the individual mandate would automatically mean all 16 million people added by it would drop their healthcare coverage (now, with the data we have in 2020, we know that was laughably false).

I concluded this at the time.

When you put all this together, the actual difference between the Republican bills and Obamacare is a few million at best. The CBO places completely unrealistic faith in the power of the individual mandate, even as they’ve been proven wrong by large margins every preceding year regarding it. At some point the obvious has to be stated. The CBO’s numbers on the healthcare market place are worthless and their baselines are so unrealistic as to provide no meaningful projections. It’s a testament to the intellectual dishonesty of our traditional media that almost none of them have bothered to address these issues. Instead we see these misleading reports parroted as fact.

While the CBO is technically “non-partisan,” that does not mean they should be exempted from criticism. Their history says that a healthy dose of skepticism is not just warranted but required.

To provide another example, the CBO projected in 2017 that American unemployment would remain around 4.7 percent for years on end. That same year, it dipped to 3.7 percent. Over a million more people joined the labor market than the CBO said would. Why? Because they used Obama-era baselines on economic growth. 

In January 2017, for example, nearly three years ago, the Congressional Budget Office forecast a 4.7 percent unemployment rate as far as the eye could see, and it projected that the United States labor force would consist of 163.3 million in 2019. The jobless rate has averaged less than 3.7 percent through the first 11 months of the year, and the labor force now stands at 164.4 million people.

Then there's the government's projection regarding Medicare and Medicaid, which it pegged in 1965 at costing just $9 billion a year by 1990. The actual number was $67 billion. 

So yeah, maybe taking the CBO's word isn't such a great idea. It also should be noted that the changes being proposed to Medicare and Medicaid in the reconciliation bill revolve around eliminating fraud, not cutting benefits for legitimate recipients (though that would be necessary for real fiscal sanity). Are Democrats arguing it's bad to stop people from defrauding the U.S. government? Because it sure seems like what they are arguing. 

Still, I highly doubt that 13.7 million people will lose their health insurance, government-funded or not, due to anything in this reconciliation bill. And when the CBO turns out to be wrong again, people will go right back to pretending they are credible the next time they need a talking point. The cycle continues.

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