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Health Care
Glenview Capital CEO Larry Robbins was unruffled by the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the Senate health-care legislation, calling some of the report’s numbers “actuarial gobbledygook.”
“From an investment perspective, we actually think the outcomes are a lot more narrow than the street may expect,” Robbins said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Thursday.
“When you get these wild projections coming out of the CBO that 20-something million people will lose insurance,” he said, “we would encourage people not to get caught up in what we would call actuarial gobbledygook.”
The CBO estimated an increase of 22 million uninsured Americans by 2026 if the Senate health-care bill is put into effect, according to a report from the office on Monday.
Robbins said the CBO’s inaccurate past predictions for the 2010 Affordable Care Act make their current projections less reliable when evaluating the Better Care Reconciliation Act.
In 2010, for instance, the CBO estimated that more than 20 million people would enroll in insurance exchanges through the ACA by 2016. The actual number in 2016 was about 10 million, according to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Yet the CBO used the inaccurate March 2016 baseline in its evaluation of the current bill.
“The CBO’s hands are tied in how they compute things,” Robbins said. “They assume that all citizens are law-abiding, which is like assuming everybody drives 55 in a 55 [mph zone],” he said.
Glenview’s projections show that perhaps 1.5 million people — not 15 million or more, as the CBO predicts — will “walk away from insurance if they have it,” Robbins said.
Glenview Capital owns holdings in a number of health-care companies, including Humana, Anthem, Aetna and Cigna, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/29/glenview-capitals-robbins-calls-cbos-health-care-numbers-gobbledygook.html