During Congressional deliberations on health care legislation during the 111th Congress, CBO prepared numerous analyses and estimates regarding the impact of various proposals on the federal budget and on aspects of health care and health insurance that were of interest to policymakers. That process began in early 2009 and continued past the enactment of the legislation in March of this year. In many cases, those estimates and analyses were prepared in collaboration with the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation.
CBOs analyses were transmitted in a variety of formatsincluding formal cost estimates, letters, tables, issue briefs, and testimonyand covered a wide range of topics, some related to specific legislative proposals and some with a broader perspective. Those documents can sometimes be difficult to find on CBOs Web site or may have titles that do not make the contents obvious. To make that information more readily accessible, CBO has compiled many of those documents in one volume, entitled Selected CBO Publications Related to Health Care Legislation, 2009-2010, which was released today. That volume begins with the cost estimate for the final version of the legislation and related analyses. It also includes several cost estimates and analyses of earlier versions of the legislation and alternative proposals that were considered by the Congress. In addition, the volume includes CBOs analyses related to insurance premiums and premium subsidies, budgetary accounting issues, changes to the medical malpractice system, and a number of other topics.
This volume consists entirely of analyses that CBO had previously released, organized in a fashion that we hope will make it a handy reference volume for future use.