This morning in a speech on the Senate floor, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) argued that the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) preliminary estimate of the HELP Committee’s health care legislation “should be a wake up call for all of us to scrap the current bill and start over and start over in a true bipartisan fashion“:

The Congressional Budget Office released a letter that stated that the Kennedy bill, the bill now pending for mark-up tomorrow, beginning tomorrow in committee would insure only one-third, only one third of the 47 million Americans who are currently uninsured for the cost of a trillion dollars….I strongly believe that we have to start over and act in a truly bipartisan fashion to address the issue.

Watch it:

As the Huffington Posts’ Sam Stein explains, “the CBO’s findings, however, are for an incomplete piece of legislation, making the cost-per-coverage estimates much worse than they will ultimately be. Republicans on the committee knew this, according to Democrats. But they pushed for the bill to be studied by the CBO now. And when poor results came back, they ran with them.”

Indeed, McCain is following the lead of Reps. John Boehner (R-OH), Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) in pretending that the organization’s estimates — which found that 15 million Americans would lose their employer-sponsored coverage and only 16 million uninsured Americans would obtain coverage — considered the whole of the legislation.

But as CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf pointed out in his letter to HELP Chairman Ted Kennedy, since the draft legislation did not include language on the extent of the employer’s responsibility or expansion of Medicaid, “those figures are not likely to represent the impact that more comprehensive proposals…would have both on the federal budget and on the extent of insurance coverage.”

“The bottom line is that we should expect the real bill to have a somewhat higher cost number but a much higher number of people getting health coverage,” Matt Yglesias writes. “Consequently the cost per person will be much lower and the legislation will look much more reasonable.” Moreover, as a new report by Ken Jacobs and Jacob Hacker explains, an employer mandate to build on the existing coverage would “reduce the incentive for firms to drop coverage” and enable most Americans to keep their existing employer-sponsored health care plans:

The employer contribution level will need to be high enough to reduce the incentive for firms to drop coverage, while also taking into account firms’ abilities to absorb the higher costs. If a sliding scale is used, payroll cost is a better measure of firms’ ability to pay than the number of employees. Sliding scales should be designed in such a way to minimize cliffs by size of firm.

In his rather bizarre floor speech, McCain called for greater bipartisanship in crafting health care reform legislation but then demanded to see the administration’s bill and re-introduced his campaign health care proposal, which, despite being rejected by all of the major stakeholders, McCain promised would be enacted “within weeks.”

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released a very preliminary cost estimate of the HELP Committee’s health care reform bill. The organization concluded that reform would cost “$1 trillion over the next decade and reduce the ranks of the uninsured by about one-third, or 16 million individuals”:

According to that assessment, enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010–2019 period. Once the proposal was fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million.

But as Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn observe, the estimate says very little about the actual cost of health care reform. Cohn:

Imagine you were trying to build your dream house and the architect gave you a status report. The design still wasn’t finished: He hadn’t sketched out the plumbing, the wiring, and the roof. But, he said, he could tell how much it would cost to build what he’d already designed. You’d be curious about the number; it might offer some hints about how much the house would cost in the end. But you wouldn’t spent too much time dwelling on it since, after all, the final price was going to be much different. Well, that’s the same attitude you should take about the estimates of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee bill that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) delivered yesterday.

Indeed, in an effort to reach a compromise with Republicans, the committee omitted language about the employer mandate or the new public health care plan. Medicaid expansion is outside of the HELP Committee’s jurisdiction (that’s up to Senate Finance) and the CBO incorrectly assumed that individuals would only pay a $100 fine if they remained uninsured. As a result, the organization concluded that reform would cost “$1 trillion over the next decade and reduce the ranks of the uninsured by about one-third, or 16 million individuals.”

The CBO scored a ‘draft of a draft’ proposal. As Paul Krugman concludes, “this was a failure of communication, partly the result of an attempt at bipartisan outreach, rather than a failure of policy.”