The Republican response to the highly-anticipated Congressional Budget Office report on the GOP health care bill—which found it would cause 24 million people to lose their health insurance over a decade—has been all over the map.
Some trumpeted the CBO’s estimate that the bill would lower the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars and bring health insurance premiums down over time. Others questioned the office’s credibility, calling the report incomplete, or rejecting the findings all together.
On Tuesday, the Senate’s Republican leaders did a little of each.
After a closed-door lunch with Vice President Mike Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters that the CBO score vindicated Republicans’ fiscal promises for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
“It shows we have a pathway to lower premiums, lower taxes, lower deficits, and the most significant entitlement reform in history,” McConnell said.
Minutes later, from the same podium, with McConnell standing by his side, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) said the CBO is not a credible source of information.
“The Congressional Budget Office is notoriously bad at anticipating what’s going to happen in the marketplace,” he said. “They’re sometimes not even good at adding and subtracting.”
Blunt used the same inaccurate talking point popular with his Republican colleagues and the White House: that the CBO was so far off on its analysis of Obamacare that the American people shouldn’t trust its reports today. In fact, the CBO’s early estimates of the total number of people to gain coverage under Obamacare and the average cost of premiums have been quite close to the real outcomes.
“This is something CBO doesn’t do very well,” he said of health care reform bills. “They haven’t been right any time in the past.”
Reporters pressed the Senate leadership on this dual message, noting that they are treating the parts of the CBO report that they like as trustworthy while dismissing as flawed the parts that make them look bad.
McConnell responded by doubling down. “The part I think is an accurate reflection is the tax reduction, the likelihood of premiums going down, and the Medicaid reforms,” he said. “What Senator Blunt pointed out that it’s pretty hard to predict coverage when the government stops telling you that you have to buy something you may not want.”
Cost and coverage, however, are inextricably intertwined. You can’t dismiss one and accept the other, because the total number of people covered by the AHCA would have a huge impact on the cost to the federal government. The lower health insurance premiums McConnell is celebrating are also linked to millions of people losing their health insurance. If older, sicker people can’t afford coverage and opt to go without it, premiums will go down for those who remain in the health insurance pool.
Ditto The Bible and the Constitution of the United States of America.
Blunt is definitely NOT a democrat!
Krugman pointed out that over the next ten years, the US GPD should total about $230 TRILLION. $337 BILLION is .14% of 230 TRILLION. That’s fourteen hundreths of a percent. That’s what the a-holes in the GOP are so proud of; saving .14% over 10 years. They couldn’t care less about the 24 million uninsured. Total raging a-holes.
I thought Roy Blunt was a R not a D.
Praise it with one hand and damn it with the other. Sometimes it has been wrong and sometimes right. Sometimes better than others. Thus is the life of economic models. It is generally not bad. Dems knock it too, when they do not get their way but they usually are not as keen on shutting them down and making the pursuit totally partisan.
From what I have read and seen, it seems like the premium decrease and the deficit reduction are more functions of making it cheaper for the young and healthy and more expensive for the old and sick. While cutting back government assistance and the like to reduce the deficit portion. If one does not care much about the downfalls, cutting the deficit is pretty easy.
It would be interesting to see how much cheaper for younger individuals. And if that would be enough to get them to buy them. Without a mandate to cause a penalty, it seems that the law lacks teeth to do much of anything. It will punish poor rural GOP voters pretty badly though.
I haven’t reviewed the CBO numbers and methodology, but I could AND understand it, too. But I agree with the people who think it is wrong, but not in the way the GOPers think it is.
Prior to ACA, business were dropping health benefits, reducing coverage, having employees pay more, etc. Then the ACA added an employer mandate, so that firms that DID pay money to cover their employees were not making the government subsidize those who weren’t. It wasn’t perfect and should have been based on full-time equivalents instead of employees working over an hour threshold, but that’s something that could have been fixed if the Rs let it, which they didn’t and would’t.
Without the ACA employer mandate, expect that process to accelerate VERY fast, far faster than the CBO could ever imagine, particularly since there are still tax credits available. So make the government subsidize people healthcare, not me, thinks a typical business owner or executive. I don’t have to pay to administer a plan or take money from my employees’ paychecks.
So fewer people will have coverage than CBO estimates, AND those who do will require more government subsidies so there goes the cost savings.
But there’s another aspect of this that the CBO report (which I read, did you?) touches on but doesn’t really go into much depth. People want healthcare and ACA made it possible for them to get it and pay some for it and for the government to pay some for it. Take that away, and a lot of money is NOT spent there, which means fewer healthcare jobs, more insecurity from people who either have coverage and may lose it, or lost it and need to spend their own money on healthcare. Healthcare is 18% of the economy, with those “good paying jobs” from engineers for medical devices to pharmacists. Take that away and BOOOOOMMM!! Instant recession.
So deficits will be higher, even more people will lose coverage, and you get a vicious cycle.
ACA, for all the bashing, set up a virtuous cycle which is why it didn’t kill the economy, explode the deficit or create a government-run healthcare system. It did increase coverage and correctly spread the cost, particularly by increasing taxes on the wealthy to help more people. If they just increase taxes a little more, and hit the freeloaders a little harder with penalties for NOT making sure they had coverage, premiums would not have jumped an deductibles would have been lower. Instead, they will do the opposite and try to spin it as an improvement. Yuck.