"CBO feels crush of health care requests"

The CBO scoring process has been manipulated in part because the Republicans haven't been able to get the CBO to estimate what some key parts of the health care bill are going to do to total costs. Whether on purpose or by accident it doesn't really matter. What is the impact of banning different insurance premiums based on pre-existing conditions? I think that it will be huge, but CBO has refused to answer saying that they have been kept too busy by the Democrat majority.

President Obama's agenda has so overloaded Congress that its legislative gatekeepers - the analysts who score each bill and the auditors who weed out waste and fraud - can't keep up.

Repeated requests from lawmakers seeking to have their health care reform plans evaluated have overwhelmed the Congressional Budget Office, where some health analysts are putting in 100-hour workweeks. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office, Congress' chief investigative arm, says it needs an additional 144 staffers just to track waste and abuse from the $862 billion Recovery Act that was enacted last year.

"The almost-round-the-clock schedule maintained this past year by CBO's current staff cannot be maintained much longer," that agency's director, Douglas W. Elmendorf, testified Wednesday to a House Appropriations subcommittee as he made a pitch to add new staff to his stressed-out team. . . .