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DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN, FORMER CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE DIRECTOR: You're going to put two kinds of people into the system who are not in it right now, people with preexisting conditions with chronic healthcare costs. They are expensive. And in principle you are going to put in the young and healthy. They're cheap.

If you only put in the first group and you don't get the young and the healthy, you just made it a much more expensive place to operate, and insurance companies are going to have to raise the rates.

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BRET BAIER, HOST: And that was the conclusion of a new Price Waterhouse Coopers report commissioned by the health insurance companies which essentially said that because the mandates were lifted or made less restrictive by the Senate finance committee in their back and forth over this bill, they essentially will drive up premiums because insurance companies will pass the additional costs on to consumers.

So what about this on the eve of the Senate finance committee vote on that bill? Let's bring in our panel, Steve Hayes, senior writer for The Weekly Standard, Juan Williams, news analyst for National Public Radio, and the syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Steve, the impact of this new report on this vote tomorrow.

STEVE HAYES, SENIOR WRITER, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Well, I don't think there will be a significant impact, actually. Last week we had the Congressional Budget Office report that is seems to be something of a shot in the arm for supporters of the Baucus plan.

I didn't think that was actually going to have much of an impact for the same reasons that I don't think this will have much of an impact.

It gives opponents of the legislation something to talk about and it gives them a number. It says, look, in 2019, these plans will cost $4,000 more per family. And it is a talking point that the average American family can understand.

But at this point, it does little to change the overall dynamics of the debate, which I think largely written in stone. You have seen these proposals generally understood as increasingly unpopular, and you still have yet to resolve the fight between Democrats among the various proposals.

BAIER: Here is what the White House said about this report. Linda Douglass, communication director for the Office of Health Reform said this -- "This is a self-serving analysis from the insurance industry, one of the major opponents of health insurance reform. It comes on the eve of a vote that will reduce the industry's profits. It is hard to take seriously."

Juan, they also point to subsidies that are aimed in this bill to help people afford insurance and they say this report didn't take that into account.

It seems, however, that people are raring that it was cut and dry. When the mandates were lifted or made less harsh, if you will, it opened the door to where is this money going to come from?

JUAN WILLIAMS, NEWS ANALYST, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: That's a legitimate question. The question is, if you don't force people into the plan, and as you just heard, then there will be a problem with paying for the plan. Everybody has to be in, especially those who are young and healthy and who don't have medical problems.

The issue here is really a political one, though, Bret. I think what you heard when the CBO scored it and scored it well was a roar of jubilation and celebration coming from the Democrats who knew that the cost issue in this time of great deficits was something that was driving public opinion away from support for healthcare reform.

Now you get the insurance companies coming forth with their own, and you have some who are the strongest critics on the Hill saying wait, what about this?

The problem is it is not sponsored by the insurance companies and the insurance companies have long been the bad guys in the White House targets. And they're the ones seen as having limited accessibility to health care portability, done stuff that would hurt people in terms of their ability to afford health care.

BAIER: Because the mandates were taken out, does this now embolden people like Senator Rockefeller and Senator Schumer who want the public option to force the competition basically the across the board healthcare mandate?

WILLIAMS: In fact with the public option it would in fact then weaken -- one of the criticisms in the insurance company analysis here is that this will force more people into the public sphere and therefore take them away from the insurance companies, take them away and increase costs for families, increased taxes on premium plans.

Those are things that would drive up costs.

BAIER: Charles?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: I think the report is obvious and intuitive. If you don't have the young and healthy in the system, you weaken the mandate, you can either have a huge increase in premiums on the rest of us or the insurance companies will go bust.

So there will be an increase in premiums. It's typical of the station that it attacks the messenger and not address the message.

But I think the point that Steve and Juan have talked about, the CBO report. I think that was an extremely important political event. The report today will not have an effect on the debate in the long run but the CBO was the first time that you got a favorable ruling which said that the plan in the Congress is not going to explode the deficit.

The problem is that it was not intentionally, but it is extremely misleading, and the reason is that the taxation that will support the plan starts almost immediately, but the benefits only kick in in three years.

That means that if you calculate over ten years, you've got ten years of revenues into the system, only seven years of expenditures, so of course you're going to have a surplus.

But if you do it -- if you look at each year after the benefits have kicked in, it runs a deficit. So the CBO report, which is extremely helpful to Democrats and the administration, has inside of it a contradiction which hasn't been exposed. And that is why I think it is misleading in this debate.

BAIER: Quickly.

BAIER: I think Charles is exactly right about the math, but I think you're wrong about the politics of it. I don't think it matters.

That would have mattered if Obama had gotten support of a Baucus- type bill, if there had been a Baucus-type bill back in June or July and the CBO report had come out and addressed that, at that point it might have created some momentum. I think we are far beyond the point where it can create momentum.

BAIER: Down the line, it passes tomorrow?

HAYES: Probably.

WILLIAMS: Yes. And then you get into a long argument with the other Senate committee and conference, and now the game begins.

KRAUTHAMMER: Yes.

If I could just add, the CBO reports in the summer that were negative really helped the opposition. The CBO report last week really helped Obama.