Maybe you saw the score the Congressional Budget Office gave the House healthcare bill, and thought there could not be a bill worse than this one, but then Senate leaders outdid the House bill. The Senate has offered a bill that would repeal Obamacare and replace it by 2020.
The Congressional Budget Office released its evaluation on the Senate’s plan to repeal Obamacare and it’s alarming. The CBO estimated that 17 million people, who currently have health insurance won’t by next year if the Senate bill were to become law. An additional 15 million people would lose their health insurance by 2026 for a grand total of 32 million losing health insurance.
If 32 million people being cut from health insurance isn’t bad enough, the CBO estimates that for those who can still afford health insurance, their premiums would increase by 25 percent on average.
The CBO is viewed by most political insiders as a non-partisan group that does not have any dog in the fight, regardless President Donald Trump and his White House staff has criticized every CBO analysis when it does not conform to their beliefs. The White House said the CBO’s estimate is wrong.
“We continue to believe that CBO’s methodology is flawed, and this score fails to take into account the president’s full plan, which includes a replacement for Obamacare and administrative actions to reduce costs and expand access to quality, affordable care,” the White House said in a statement, according to a story published by CBS News.
It was not too long ago the Senate proposed an earlier version of its healthcare bill and the CBO estimated that bill would cause 22 million people to lose insurance. The bill failed to earn a vote in the Senate because there was not enough support to pass it.
The main problem with the Senate bill is that it’s really no bill at all about providing health insurance to Americans. It is basically a bill that repeals Obamacare, but does not replace it. Trump and other Republicans have said they could repeal Obamacare now and replace it later, but no one knows what a new healthcare bill would look like and there is no guarantee a new healthcare plan would pass. The bill calls for a repeal of Obamacare by 2020 allowing Congress to come up with a new plan prior to that.
Here is a closer look at what the new bill would do, according to a story published by CNN Money:
- The individual mandate and employer mandate that everyone is covered with health insurance would be history and there would be no penalties for someone if they don’t purchase health insurance.
- The subsidies provided to people to purchase individual health coverage would be ended by 2020 when Obamacare would expire.
- Medicaid expansion, which is a federal program for poor people to access healthcare, would be eliminated by 2020.
- The bill would repeal taxes on the wealthy, health insurers, medical device makers and others.
- The repeal would de-fund Planned Parenthood for at least one year.
- Increase funding for substance abuse and mental health needs by $1.5 billion over two years.
The good news is a repeal of Obamacare would decrease federal deficits by $473 billion over the next 10 years, but that would only be achieved if Congress never passed a health bill to replace Obamacare.
The Senate does have a bill that would replace Obamacare that the CBO has yet to score. Once that analysis has been released we will revisit how that bill would impact the American people.
