HEALTH Panel Act
This bill, the Healthy Equipping And Lending Technical Help Panel Act (HEALTH Panel Act), would formally create and embed a Panel of Health Advisors within the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The Panel would provide technical health- and health-economics expertise to improve CBO’s studies, analyses, and cost estimates on health policy. It sets who serves on the Panel, how long they serve, how they are appointed, and how their work is reported. The Panel would issue an annual report detailing its work and how its recommendations were used by CBO, and it would focus on priority areas such as health-care financing, official cost estimates for health legislation, and health-related projections in CBO’s published outlooks. The bill also establishes ethics and confidentiality provisions to govern Panel members. In short, the bill aims to strengthen CBO’s capacity to analyze health policy by creating a formal, publicly accountable advisory group that focuses specifically on health and health care issues, with regular reporting and specific governance rules.
Key Points
- 1Creation and placement: Establishes a Panel of Health Advisors within the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to advise on health policy analysis and cost estimation.
- 2Duties and reporting: The Panel provides expertise to improve health-related studies and official cost estimates, meets at least once a year, and issues an annual report detailing its work and how recommendations were used by CBO. The annual report is to be posted publicly on the CBO website.
- 3Priority areas: The Panel concentrates on health finance and economics studies, official cost estimates for proposed health legislation, models projecting health policy impacts, and health components of CBO’s major publications (e.g., Budget and Economic Outlook, health subsidies, and insurance coverage projections).
- 4Membership and appointments: The Panel has 15 members appointed within 90 days of enactment:
- 5- 3 by the House Budget Committee chair
- 6- 3 by the House Budget Committee ranking member
- 7- 3 by the Senate Budget Committee chair
- 8- 3 by the Senate Budget Committee ranking member
- 9- 3 by the Director of the CBO
- 10Qualifications and status: Members are expected to have expertise in health finance, economics, actuarial science, health care delivery, Medicare/Medicaid, and related fields; members serve as special Government employees.
- 11Terms and governance: Members serve 3-year terms with staggered start terms; vacancies are filled the same way as original appointments; a chair and vice chair are designated by the CBO Director, with input from committee leaders, and must be chosen based on fitness rather than political affiliation.
- 12Term limits: Members may serve up to two 3-year terms (maximum 6 years on the Panel), with vacancy service counted toward years served.
- 13Ethics and confidentiality: The Director may require public disclosures of conflicts of interest and may require confidentiality agreements to protect confidential information used in analyses and reports.