Mulvaney was particularly critical of the CBO’s recent estimate that the House-passed healthcare bill would result in 23 million fewer people with health insurance. He argued that the CBO’s model assumed that the mandate requiring individuals obtain coverage has a lot more influence on people’s decisions than it does in real life.

“Did you see the methodology on that 23 million people getting kicked off their health insurance?” he said. “You recognize of course that they assume that people voluntarily get off of Medicaid? That’s just not defensible. It’s almost as if they went into it and said, ‘Okay, we need this score to look bad. How do we do it?'”

He added the CBO assumptions were “just absurd. To think that you would give up a free Medicaid program and choose instead to be uninsured is counterintuitive.”

He suggested that there was a bias at work. “If the same person is doing the score of undoing Obamacare who did the scoring of Obamacare in the first place, my guess is that there is probably some sort of bias in favor of a government mandate,” he said.