Economists Supporting the Ribble Long-Term Scoring Proposal

Issues: Budget, Health Care, Medicare

Congressional Budget Office Scoring: Economist Statement

The undersigned economists support reforming the Congressional Budget Act to require long-term estimates that better identify the benefits of health care prevention programs.

We believe the current practice of the Congressional Budget Office to produce budget estimates in three-, five-, seven-, or ten-year increments is incapable of capturing both the costs and the benefits of programs extending beyond the budget window.

This dynamic is particularly harmful to efforts to improve the overall health of the American population through federal prevention programs. The benefits of prevention programs often take years or decades to materialize, but they can have a powerful impact on population health and the cost of federal health care programs. Finite budget windows, even windows extending out ten years, generally fail to capture these benefits.

To address this challenge, we support reforming the Budget Act to allow for long-term analysis of prevention policies to ensure that such policies are more accurately judged on both their costs and benefits.

Sincerely,

CBO ECONOMISTS STATEMENT

 

NAME

AFFILIATION

1

Gordon J. Alexander

University of Minnesota

2

Zolton Acs

George Mason University

3

James J. Angel

University of Pennsylvania, Wharton

4

Avner Ben-Ner

University of Minnesota

5

Cyrus Bina

University of Minnesota

6

Phillip Bryson

Brigham Young University

7

Sean Cash

Tufts University

8

Roger Bove

West Chester University

9

Warren Coats

n/a

10

Peter Cramton

University of Maryland

11

Walter Dolde

University of Connecticut

12

Christian Dippon

NERA Economic Consulting

13

Gregory Price

Langston University

14

John Merrifield

University of Texas-San Antonio

15

Peter Schaeffer

West Virginia University

16

Danilo Santini

Argonne National Laboratory

17

John Sorrentino

Temple University

18

Cornelia Strawser

n/a

19

Thomas Schellberg

Casper College

20

Cliff Russell

Vanderbilt University

21

Roger van Haefen

North Carolina State University

22

Rob Wassmer

California State University, Sacramento

23

Nicolaus Tideman

Virginia Tech University

24

Kevin Williams

DeLaroche & Company, Inc.

25

Eric Woychik

Strategy Integration, LLC

26

Marcus Hulbert

n/a

27

Henry Levin

Columbia University, Teachers College

28

Andrea Maneschi

Vanderbilt University

29

Paul Hudson

n/a

30

Paul Hughes-Cromwick

Altarum Institute

31

John Tomer

Manhattan College

32

Walter McMahon

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

33

Naveen Khanna

Michigan State University

34

John Miller

Wheaton College

35

Shannon Mitchell

Virginia Commonwealth University

36

Lawrence Kotlikoff

n/a

37

Mary Goldschmid

n/a

38

David Gogerty

n/a

39

Ken Acks

The Cost Benefit Group

40

Tania Barham

University of Colorado-Boulder

41

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, Ph.D.

Amherst College

42

Elizabeth Bogan

Princeton University

43

Jon Birkeli

LaGrange College

44

Patricia Byrnes

University of Illinois Springfield

45

Daniel Finn

St. John's University

46

Andrew Healy

Loyola Marymount University

47

C. Richard Shumway

Washington State University

48

Dave Garthoff

University of Akron

49

Marvin Feldman

Resource Decisions

50

Robert Haveman

University of Wisconsin-Madison

51

Charles Rock

Rollins College

52

Shah Shahjahan

Pepco Holdings, Inc.

53

Kalyan Singhal

University of Baltimore

54

Beth Wilson

Humboldt State University

55

Tetsuji Yamada

Rutgers University

56

Thomas Weisskopf

University of Michigan

57

Glenn Loury

Brown University

58

Stanley Masters

State University of New York at Binghamton

59

Thomas Muench

Stonybrook University

60

Michelle Michot Foss

University of Texas 

61

B Patrick Joyce

Michigan Technological University

62

Jerrold P. Katz

J.P. Katz & Associates

63

Todd Knoop

Cornell College