nobody has an exact score. dr. tom price the secretary of health and human services pointed out there are whole sections of this bill they didn t score. so i really do think it s disgusting. i m really disappointed that the republicans have not abolished the congressional budget office because it is so profoundly dishonest. brian bribe the guy in charge was approved by tom price and his committee and was appointed during the years when bush was in office. so maybe it s just hard to in 2014 they came out and said we have begun to we are going to stop looking at obamacare. it is now impossible by the numbers that are coming out to score it. so they said we throw up our hands. that was in 2014. that was the story in the hill. steve: back in the day they estimated, the cbo estimated 23 million americans would have healthcare through the affordable care act by 2017 right now. 23 million. do you know how many there are? 9.3. so they were way off. brian: we have the director of
steve a number of years ago the architect of obamacare called the has actually called the new g.o.p. he he plan a scam. remember this he once scammed toe pass obamacare. this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the cbo didn t score the mandate as taxes. if they scored it as taxes it dies. it is a huge political advantage. basically call it the stupidity of the american voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting this thing to pass. steve: okay. critical to get it pass. joining us with his reaction. president of the american action forum douglass eakin. good morning, douglass. good morning, how are you? steve: doing okay. i was shorkd when i first heard jonathan gruber say that essentially they pulled the wool over everybody s eyes to get this thing pass-to-pass.
if you think back to that time then president obama had run opposing the mandate and promising not to tax the middle class. now they are doing one or the other no. way around it had to be pretty nontransparent to get it through no. question about it. steve: they were not transparent. however you say with this new republican plan with obamacare they are being transparent. it s 120 pages. anyone can read it. there is no real attempt to deceive here. what the republicans have said is we can rely on americans to make good decisions about their healthcare and we can be honest about what we are going asking them to do. that s what the bill is. steve: sure. so you look at it and there are two headlines. one, if you are a budget hawk, you love the fact that over 10 years you re going to save something like $335 billion. that s good. that is the lead. i think this has been misunderstood. cbo s job is to advise congress on budgetary matters. this is quote a reconciliation bill special proc
we told her the day after she graduate, she s on her own. she has a job in september. she was fretting, what does she do for the four months? does she buy health insurance for $1,200 a month. she called me after the bill passed and said, dad, i m covered. there will be millions of calls like that. i predict by november those who voted for health care will find it an asset. those who voted against it will find it a liability. senator graham, the same legacy question for you. here is the backdrop in terms of what people actually think about this. after all has been said and done, a 13-month battle over this where, as the president said, everybody had therapies on this. every opinion was aired. this is the polling from the washington post out this morning. 50% still oppose health care reform. what s the legacy? well, i think it s going to be on the medicare front that we ll take $570 billion out of medicare which is already $34 trillion underfunded and give it to somebody else. so t
way it is. to be realistic. some of the cost-cutting will go into effect right away. everyone knows, the waste, fraud, abuse, duplication in the system. the answer on the other side is do nothing, repeal it. we have to get handle on costs. for me at least, the number one rationale for this bill, i think it s important to cover people, but the most important thing to do is to get a handle on the costs that are out of control that are killing business, killing individuals and killing our federal deficit. does this do everything in that regard? no. is it the first major step to do it in a very large way? you bet. in the second ten years when it really bites you can t do all this overnight, they predict a trillion dollars of savings, the biggest savings we ve ever seen in any federal program. okay. let me ask you, senator graham i think has difficulty hearing us. i disagree with chuck in case you can t hear me. senator, what is your response?