Comparing the Finance Bills

Igor Volsky has a fantastic chart comparing the CBO estimate of Max Baucus's first draft and of the amended bill. The takeaway is that the final bill spends slightly less on subsidies, does somewhat more to reduce the deficit and costs a bit more overall. In other words, for all of Baucus's vaunted centrism, the bill got more, rather than less, conservative as it made its way through his committee.

For all that, I'd caution that the primary purpose of the CBO score is to get the bill out of the Finance Committee. After that happens, Reid is going to blend it with the HELP Committee's more liberal bill, and that will entail some substantial changes. This is, in other words, not the final score, or the final bill. It's just this week's score, and this week's bill. What's important about it is that it will allow the bill to clear the most conservative committee it was ever going to have to face.