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Letter to the Honorable Ron Wyden 1 (May 2008)

handle is hein.congrec/cbo9341 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional Budget Office Staff of the U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Taxation May 1, 2008 Honorable Ron Wyden United States Senate Washington, DC 20510 Honorable Robert F. Bennett United States Senate Washington, DC 20510 Dear Senators: At your request, the staffs of our two organizations have collaborated on a preliminary analysis of a modified proposal for comprehensive health insurance based on S. 334, the Healthy Americans Act, which you introduced last year. That modified proposal includes various clarifications and changes that you have indicated you would like to examine as part of the consideration of that bill. Attachment A summarizes our understanding of your modified proposal. The staffs of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have worked closely together for the past several months to analyze your modified proposal; this collaboration reflects both the novelty of the undertaking and the intimate connection between the revenue and expenditure components of this proposal. We have summarized our conclusions in this joint letter; its purpose is to give you preliminary guidance regarding an approximate range of revenue and cost results that might be expected from your modified proposal. This joint letter does not constitute and should not be interpreted as a formal estimate of your proposal's budgetary impact, which-for the purposes of scoring under the Congressional Budget Act-would ultimately be provided by CBO and would incorporate revenue estimates prepared by the JCT staff. The basic thrust of your modified proposal is to require individuals to purchase private health insurance and to establish state-run purchasing pools and a system of Federal premium collections and subsidies to facilitate those purchases. The system's premium collection and subsidy mechanisms would be based largely on income tax filings, and the required benefits would initially be based on the Blue Cross/Blue Shield standard plan offered to Federal workers in 2011 and then allowed to grow at the rate of growth of the economy. Although employers would have the option of continuing to offer coverage to their workers, nearly all

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