One day before a scheduled House vote to repeal Obamacare, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office announced that it will not be scoring the legislation.
The CBO explained that doing so could take weeks and that it is currently in the middle of performing other tasks.
“Unfortunately, we will not be able to [provide a cost estimate],” CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf said in a letter to House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI).
“Preparing a new estimate of the budgetary impact of repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would take considerable time—probably several weeks—for CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), because there are hundreds of provisions in the ACA and those provisions are already in various stages of implementation. Moreover, we have just finished the time-consuming task of updating our baseline budget projections and need to finish our analysis of the President’s budgetary proposals.”
CBO noted in the letter that it found in July 2012 that repealing Obamacare would increase budget deficits by $109 billion over the next decade.
