Ending Obamacare Would Cost $353 Billion Over Decade, CBO Says
Source: Bloomberg
Jun 19, 2015 11:47 AM EDT
Zachary Tracer
Repealing President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul would increase the federal budget deficit by $353 billion over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office said.
Ending the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would increase spending on Medicare while reducing outlays for health-insurance subsidies, Medicaid and coverage for poor children, the agency said in a report Friday. Repealing the law would probably boost the economy as more people sought work to get health insurance, reducing the net cost to $137 billion, the CBO said.
The report is a blow for Republican lawmakers who have sought to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act ever since its passage in 2010. If the law were undone, about 19 million more people would become uninsured in 2016, rising to 24 million by 2025, the CBO said.
“An end to the ACA’s subsidies for health insurance coverage would generate gross savings,” the CBO said in its report. “The net savings from repealing the law’s coverage provisions would increase more slowly than the net costs of repealing the act’s other provisions.”
Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-06-19/ending-obamacare-would-cost-353-billion-over-decade-cbo-says
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Rossi
(56 posts)Because of all the preventive medicine that would not be provided by Obamacare? And how is that unverifiable claim established?
CreekDog
(46,192 posts)from the CBO report itself, you'll see your assumption is not the claim:
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/50252
Beauregard
(376 posts)Try not to say nothing next time.
CreekDog
(46,192 posts)That poster said that the CBO said that Medicare costs would increase because of less preventative care (except they said nothing of the sort) and then the poster said the claim was unverifiable.
But they never said it in the first place, HE DID, he made it up, and then claimed that they didn't back up a statement that HE, not THEY said.
And you? You posted but didn't bother to follow the topic that you commented on.
here's more from the CBO Report:
p.4
The ACA also includes many other provisions related
to health care that are estimated to reduce net federal
outlays, primarily for Medicare. The provisions with
the largest effects reduced payments to hospitals, to
other providers of care, and to private insurance plans
delivering Medicare’s benefits, relative to what they
would have been under prior law. Repealing all of
those provisions would increase direct spending in the
next decade by $879 billion, CBO estimates.
p.5
That growth in projected increases in deficits from
repealing the ACA reflects the agencies’ estimates that,
toward the end of the 10-year budget window, the net
savings from repealing the law’s coverage provisions
would increase more slowly than the net costs of repeal-
ing the act’s other provisions. Although many factors
would affect the rate of growth of the savings from repeal-
ing the coverage provisions, one reason they would grow
slowly is that the annual updates to exchange subsidies
are structured in a way that slows their growth, which
limits the savings from eliminating them; another is that
the revenue loss from repealing the excise tax on certain
high-premium insurance plans would grow very rapidly
as more plans were affected each year. However, the reve-
nue losses and spending increases that would result from
repealing the act’s other provisions would grow more rap-
idly than the net savings from repealing the coverage
provisions. Most significantly, the costs of repealing the
ACA’s reductions in updates to Medicare’s payment rates
would compound over the next decade because those
reductions lower the growth rate of Medicare’s costs.
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/reports/50252-Effects_of_ACA_Repeal.pdf
Igel
(35,332 posts)Take this for example.
There are repeated "budget savings" in reducing payments to physicians for Medicare and Medicaid. The official savings report assumes the reductions happen, because that's what the law requires the CBO to assume. But invariably such payments aren't reduced or aren't reduced to the extent "required". Since those additional payments aren't part of the ACA, they don't count as ACA overruns.
The TAA was involved in one such tussle: There was a proposed increase to Medicare over and above what the ACA stipulated would be the maximum reimbursement. But to not increase the Medicare payments was deemed a reduction from the current effective rates (which were, in turn, the ACA-stipulated rates + an additional amount allocated by Congress last year), and so the TAA had to be fought because it amounted to reduced Medicare payments.
It makes anything from the CBO on this matter so difficult to parse as to make me run for the acetominophen.
Turbineguy
(37,359 posts)republicans don't care about costs or deficits. 24 million candidates for early death. Even IS would drool over that.
Vinca
(50,299 posts)
TexasBushwhacker
(20,208 posts)Not to mention the payroll taxes the dead/disabled person would have paid to the federal government, as well as the payroll taxes paid by their employers.
It would also increase the burden on city and county hospital districts. All those dollars count, even if they aren't in the federal budget.
lark
(23,134 posts)Deficits ALWAYS skyrocket when a R is president. They are totally willing to spend any amount of money imaginable, just so long as it helps the really rich. Screwing the working class is a bonus but not the major goal. They don't care about our country, not one whit. They only care about increasing their personal power and income by promoting the 1% to even dizzier heights. They only scream about deficits when the bill would promote the general welfare or help the working classk. That they can't stand.
My words exactly.
cal04
(41,505 posts)The economist that Republicans handpicked to run the Congressional Budget Office just told Republicans that one of their favorite arguments about Obamacare is wrong.
According to a report the CBO released Friday, repealing the Affordable Care Act wouldn't reduce the deficit, as Republicans have long claimed. It would increase the deficit, by at least $137 billion over 10 years and maybe a lot more than that -- with the effects getting bigger over time.
Of course, that’s in addition to the effect repeal would have on the number of Americans without health insurance. The CBO says the ranks of the uninsured would increase by 19 million people next year.
(snip)
o say Republicans were unhappy about this assessment would be a gross understatement. They talked (and still talk) of the health care law as a “budget buster,” refusing to acknowledge the CBO’s verdict or, at the very least, questioning the assumptions behind it. Although Republican leaders frequently praised Elmendorf -- U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (Texas) once said, “God bless Dr. Doug Elmendorf for his integrity and his commitment to telling the truth” -- this year they opted to replace him with Keith Hall, a more conservative economist who had served on the Council of Economic Advisers in the George W. Bush administration. At the same time, the House passed a rule requiring that the CBO use “dynamic scoring” -- a controversial method of projection that, conservatives say, better incorporates their thinking about how laws will affect the economy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/19/obamacare-repeal-deficit_n_7622578.html
