CBO Says It Can't Score Obama's Health Care Plan Without More Detail

The director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, said today that President Obama's health care proposal isn't detailed enough to score.

"Preparing a cost estimate requires very detailed specifications of numerous provisions, and the materials that were released this morning do not provide sufficient detail on all of the provisions," Elmendorf wrote on his official CBO blog. "Therefore, CBO cannot provide a cost estimate for the proposal without additional detail, and, even if such detail were provided, analyzing the proposal would be a time-consuming process that could not be completed this week."

He also wrote that, although Obama's proposal includes many provisions that were in the already-scored House and Senate health care bills, "it modifies many of those elements and also includes new ones."

"We have just begun the process of reviewing it," Elmendorf added.

The White House released Obama's proposal today ahead of a bipartisan health care summit planned for Thursday.