Look At CBO Report From Two Media Outlets

Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office issued a new report on the cost of the Affordable Care Act. What struck me as interesting was how the story was covered by different media outlets.

Over at CNBC the focus was on the report reducing the short term costs by about $ 50 billion.

At Fox News they took a look at the aspect of the report stating that the long term costs of the law are going to be higher.

The left and right blogs took the same kind of slant, the liberal ones focusing on the areas of the report that emphasized savings while the conservative ones looked at the higher costs.

The truth is both aspects of the report have grains of truth. The older reports did not include the year 2021 and beyond while the newer one does. The costs in the initial period through 2020 are smaller but the costs in 2021 and beyond are higher than previously estimated.

In addition some of the reports and projections focus only on the insurance costs and not on the other aspects of implementing the plan.

And of course number are easy to play with, so the figures are likely to change as time moves on.

But the interesting thing for me was how two people could look at the same report and reach totally different conclusions.