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New From Keith Olbermann: Gutting Health Care Will Kill Americans

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goddamnedfrank3/14/2017 2:45:06 am PDT

The White House is scrambling to explain why their own leaked estimate was worse than the CBO numbers.

White House officials late Monday night disputed that the document is an analysis of the bill’s coverage effects. Instead, they say it was an attempt by the Office of Management and Budget to predict what CBO’s scorekeepers would conclude about the GOP repeal plan.

“This is not an analysis of the bill in any way whatsoever,” White House Communications Director Michael Dubke told POLITICO. “This is OMB trying to project what CBO’s score will be using CBO’s methodology.”

LOL, OK. Not sure why OMB would be trying to rush out an ersatz CBO score in advance since everyone knew the real CBO score was going to be devastating based on previous unreleased iterations of the ACA repeal bill and they never planned to include OMB’s score in their decision making paradigm.

Still, if true it’s another good example of how this White House can’t even tie its shoes without managing to shit the bed. Because now it looks like A.) They were prepared for it to be even worse, and B.) They’ve shown that OMB’s methodology isn’t some bullshit random number generator, but instead a fairly well understood formula that produces estimates within a relatively narrow margin.

So now they’re going to triple down by selling a bunch of magic fairy dust and insane boot-strappy nonsense that bears no similarity with observable reality whatsoever.