The top Democrats on both House committees responsible for Republicans’ Obamacare replacement plan criticized that plan on Monday, after the Congressional Budget Office estimated 24 million people would lose health care coverage by 2026 as a result of the bill.
Reps. Richard Neal (D-MA) and Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ), the ranking members of the Ways and Means Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee, respectively, condemned the American Health Care Act in a joint statement Monday afternoon.
“Today’s CBO report now confirms what we already knew: despite promises that ‘everyone would be covered’ and ‘no one would be worse off,’ this Republican bill would rip away health insurance from 24 million Americans over the next decade and ask millions to pay more for less coverage,” the pair wrote. “Despite warnings from independent experts like CBO and others, Republicans continue to recklessly jam this bill through Congress without so much as a single hearing on what effects their plan will have on middle-class families.”
“This report also reaffirms that the Republican plan does absolutely nothing to control costs or protect consumers. Instead, it guts Medicaid, raises costs on older Americans, and pulls billions of dollars from Medicare, all in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich.”
The Congressional Budget Office, in a highly anticipated report published Monday, estimated that tens of millions of people would lose health care coverage as a result of the bill, who would otherwise stay covered under the Affordable Care Act. And though most of the bill goes into effect by 2020, the CBO predicted that 14 million more people would go without care by 2018.
The office said the coverage losses were the result of the loss of Obamacare’s mandate, the loss of subsidies to buy insurance in favor of smaller tax credits and the freezing of the Medicaid expansion authorized by Obamacare.
“This is a major step backwards for millions of Americans who now enjoy the benefits and protections of quality health insurance gained under the Affordable Care Act. We strongly urge Republicans to back off their politically-motivated march to sabotage our health care system and instead work with Democrats to strengthen it,” Neal and Pallone said in their statement.
Republicans discredited the CBO’s insurance coverage bean-counting on the Affordable Care Act, but the office’s former director and others told TPM their count wasn’t nearly as far off as many Republicans portray it today.
