This afternoon in New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich referred to the Congressional Budget Office — the body responsible for scoring the affect of congressional legislation on the deficit — as “a reactionary socialist institution.” As Political Correction’s Jamison Foser points out, Gingrich has been accusing the CBO of socialism since at least 1994, even though he has relied on the budget office repeatedly to produce nonpartisan scores of critical legislation. Here he is talking about the importance of the CBO in 1995:

Let me say, first of all, that we knew the President would veto the Balanced Budget Act. We’re still very proud of the fact that — as a team — House and Senate Republican passed the first balanced budget in a generation. And we did it working together, solving tremendous number of problems. We did it honestly, using the Congressional Budget Office which was tough. [...]

And yet, I have to say that I have mixed emotions today. On the one hand the President said yesterday he’s going to send up a seven-year balanced budget. It won’t yet be scored by the Congressional Budget Office. But they’ve agreed the Congressional Budget Office would do the scoring.

Now, just to make clear why that’s important. The so-called “balanced budget” of the President over here, when scored by the Congressional Budget Office, suddenly became a $200 billion a year deficit. So, we can’t rely on some phony White House score. And we want to just make clear that our first principle is that whatever the President sends up, we’re going to insist on honest scoring to get honest numbers, which were the ground rules that we wrote the Balanced Budget Act by.

This kind of animosity — or some degree of it — is prevalent in both parties, with Democrats demonstrating a good deal of frustration during the health reform effort about the CBO’s refusal to score prevention and delivery reform provisions as savings. In fact as Paul Starr has pointed out, “Obama agreed to delay implementation of the major provisions of the [health] law until January 2014,” as a way to ensure a good deficit reduction score from the agency. “CBO is God around here,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) likes to say, “because policy lives and dies by CBO’s word. Like the Bible, a CBO document can mean different things to different people and it’s easy to pull things out in isolation to justify a position.”

But molding legislation to CBO rules and whims certainly doesn’t make for the very best policy. The office follows budgetary rules that Congress “originally established in the conference report on the Balanced Budget Act of 1997″ and Gingrich personally voted for, and so if lawmakers aren’t happy with the CBO’s assumption, they have a means of changing them. (That is, if they can ever stop cherry picking favorable scores while complaining about unfavorable numbers.)

Brian Beutler reports that Newt Gingrich has come out in favor of doing away with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) — the only nonpartisan entity that evaluates how legislative proposals effect the national deficit:

“If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies,” Gingrich said at a Saturday debate with embattled pizza entrepreneur Herman Cain. “Every hospital will tell you that if you get the family and patient involved, it is better and less expensive. The Congressional Budget Office refuses to see this as a savings. It wants more bureaucracy and less patient involvement.”

In a technical sense, Gingrich is correct. The Congressional Budget Office will make it hard for Republicans to completely repeal Obamacare, even if they unify control of government in 2013. CBO is the agency that evaluates for lawmakers the impact their legislation is expected to have on the federal budget. And unfortunately for Republicans, the health care law was devised to score as a deficit reducer, particularly after its first 10 years of existence. By direct corollary, the CBO says repealing the whole thing would increase projected deficits. For political and (more importantly) procedural reasons, that would make a complete repeal almost impossible.

Of course, the CBO doesn’t actually lie. Rather, it follows budgetary rules that Congress “originally established in the conference report on the Balanced Budget Act of 1997″ and Gingrich personally voted for. And yes, those rules often ignore savings from prevention and delivery system reforms that many economists believe would modernize the health care system and result in real savings and efficiences. If lawmakers want to receive credit for those savings, however, they can do something far less dramatic than eliminating the budget office and simply vote to change CBO’s scoring methods.

Inside Health Policy’s Sahil Kapur notices that Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is arguing that Congress should repeal the health care law in order to reduce the deficit, dismissing the debt savings from the measure and the Congressional Budget Office’s projections that eliminating the law would “would worsen the budget outlook.” From Hatch’s press release:

With the national debt more than $14.5 trillion and unemployment still over nine percent, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) called for the repeal of ObamaCare to be considered as a means to reduce the deficit and create jobs.

“We all knew that ObamaCare was going to be disastrous for our economy and every day that goes by proves that point,” Hatch said. “Whether it be the trillions of dollars in tax hikes or the sheer number of job losses directly from ObamaCare itself, it’s clear that repealing ObamaCare must be on the table during any talks to slash our nation’s debt and create much-needed jobs.”

When Kapur confronted Hatch’s office with CBO data which found that repeal would increase the deficit by $230 billion over 10 years, raise the number of uninsured by 32 million, eliminate subsidies, and force millions of American families to pay higher premiums, and increase premiums for employer-based coverage, Hatch spokeswoman Julia Lawless called its projections “gimmicks.” “That includes all of ObamaCare’s gimmicks,” she said in an email. “The true cost of the bill is $2.6 trillion and that’s a real budget-buster.”

The Congressional Budget Office has released a new report pinning this year’s deficit at $1.3 trillion – the third-largest in the last 65 years — and predicting that real GDP will rise 2.3 percent this year and 2.7 percent next year. Federal spending on health care will continue to increase faster than GDP, but CBO notes that some of the cost will be contained by the cost-saving mechanisms in the Affordable Care Act:

“CBO estimates that outlays for Medicare (excluding receipts from premiums) will total $555 billion (3.5 percent of GDP) in 2012, about the same, in nominal terms, that it estimates for 2011. Between 2013 and 2021, outlays are projected to grow at an average annual rate of 6.3 percent, reaching $966 billion (4.1 percent of GDP) in 2021. Spending will be pushed up over the decade by increases in the number of beneficiaries and in health care costs per beneficiary (in nominal terms). At the same time, growth in spending will be restrained by reductions in updates to payment rates that were included in the 2010 health care legislation and by the program’s sustainable growth rate mechanism, which, under current law, is projected to reduce payments to physicians by about 30 percent in 2012 and by additional amounts thereafter.

In other words, beginning in 2014, as 32 million individuals begin receiving health care coverage and visiting doctors, health care expenditures will naturally increase. Costs will continue to grow higher than current law until around 2015, at which point the Medicare savings (payment changes), the excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, and the Medicare payment board will cause costs “to be restrained.”