This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 8, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Congressional Budget Office is out with numbers on the cost of the Max Baucus version of Obamacare and it's just

stundered budget. But you have to make a few assumptions to make the math work.

Mike Tanner, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and co-author of the book Healthy Competition

takes a look at a few of those assumptions. The Congressional Budget

Office has sort of become the official arbiter of how much things cost in Washington.

And the president has laid down a couple of benchmarks.

He has said that he wants a health care bill that costs in the area of $900 billion

over 10 years, and that doesn't add a quote dime to the budget

deficit now or in the future. So everybody is trying to fit their health care bill into those provisions according to a congressional budget office score.

Often they end up having to sort of twist themselves into a pretzel in order to do that.

What are some of the tricks, I guess, that are involved in trying to get a good score

while being somewhat misleading about the actual cost.

Take one example.

The Congressional Budget Office looks at a 10-year budget window.

That means they start next year in 2010 and they look 10 years out until 2019.

And when they say something like the House bill costs 1.3 trillion dollars over 10 years,

that's the period they're talking about.

Yet those bills don't actually go into effect until about 2014 and then they ramp up very slowly the first year of the house bill only costs about

six billion dollars so what you're actually getting is five or six years of a bill being

in existence and calling it a 10 year cost.

That's a little bit misleading. What about the savings that are projected to be

...