Health Bill's Score Still Breathtakingly Bad

The new Congressional Budget Office numbers are in for the House healthcare bill, and they’re almost as breathtakingly bad as the first version’s score. Instead of 24 million Americans losing health insurance in the next ten years, now “only” 23 million will lose health insurance. The number of people who will lose health insurance next year alone stayed the same, at 14 million. Medicaid funding will be cut by $834 billion, instead of $880 billion. This would save a paltry $12 billion a year, instead of the $15 billion a year the original bill would have saved. That’s a lot of pain for not very much money saved. Which Democrats are going to be pointing out soon, in midterm ads. This legislation had two major goals. The first was to provide a whopping tax cut for wealthy people. The second was for Republicans to be able to claim “we repealed Obamacare.” Measured on those metrics, the bill is a success. Measured by any other metric, it is a complete disaster. The top-line numbers do not tell this story adequately. A $12 billion change in the federal budget is peanuts, after all. But when you dig into the numbers, the intent of the legislation becomes more obvious. Here are a few crucial paragraphs from the C.B.O. report (emphasis added): CBO and JCT estimate that, over the 2017-2026 period, enacting H.R. 1628 would reduce direct spending by $1,111 billion and reduce revenues by $992 billion, for a net reduction of $119 billion in the de...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news