The Congressional Budget Office’s highly anticipated analysis of the GOP bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act dropped Monday afternoon, and the office’s non-partisan research team estimated that the legislation would reduce the federal deficit by $337 billion dollars over the next 10 years.
It is one bit of good news for Republicans in a devastating report that finds tens of millions of people will lose their insurance coverage under their plan over the next decade.
The CBO under its conservative Republican director, Keith Hall (pictured), found that the savings come largely from slashing Medicaid spending, which will lead to 14 million people losing coverage. In total, the government will spend $1.2 trillion dollars less on health care under this plan.
The bill also saves the government $6 billion dollars by eliminating a tax credit for small businesses that provide health insurance to their employees, and more than $600 billion from sharply reducing the subsidies people can get to purchase private insurance on the individual market.
House Speaker Paul Ryan celebrated the report in a press release, touting its measures to “dramatically reduce the deficit.”
Yet these savings are partially offset by a massive reduction in revenue. The bill repeals nearly all of the Affordable Care Act’s taxes on the wealthy and on those who opt not to buy insurance, costing the government nearly $900 billion in revenue. The bill also adds $80 billion in new spending on a Patient and State Stability Fund that states can use to help stabilize their insurance markets help struggling residents pay their medical bills, and increases payments to hospitals that treat the uninsured by $43 billion dollars.
The CBO says in their report they were not given time to analyze the legislation’s macroeconomic effects, a crucial piece of information House lawmakers will not have when they continue debating the bill this week.
Read the full report here:
