The CBO confirms: Senate Republicans' health-care bill is a turkey - By Jennifer Rubin

[DonViejo]

The Congressional Budget Office’s highly anticipated scoring of Senate Republicans’ health-care bill was released Monday. To no one’s surprise, it leaves about as many more Americans uninsured (22 million) as the House version (23 million) by 2026; in fact the shock is greater under the Senate’s bill that would prompt 15 million to lose coverage in the first year. The CBO forecast states, “By 2026, an estimated 49 million people would be uninsured, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year under current law.”

Make no mistake: This bill is about cutting Medicaid and giving tax cuts to the rich, with health care for everyone else an afterthought. According to the CBO:

<< The largest savings would come from reductions in outlays for Medicaid — spending on the program would decline in 2026 by 26 percent in comparison with what CBO projects under current law — and from changes to the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) subsidies for nongroup health insurance (see Figure 1). Those savings would be partially offset by the effects of other changes to the ACA’s provisions dealing with insurance coverage: additional spending designed to reduce premiums and a reduction in revenues from repealing penalties on employers who do not offer insurance and on people who do not purchase insurance.

The largest increases in deficits would come from repealing or modifying tax provisions in the ACA that are not directly related to health insurance coverage, including repealing a surtax on net investment income and repealing annual fees imposed on health insurers. >>

As it did for the House version of the bill, the CBO confirms that the individual insurance market is more stable than the GOP makes it out to be, although “a small number of people live in areas of the country that have limited participation by insurers in the nongroup market under current law.” Under the proposed Senate bill, “the agencies expect that the nongroup market in most areas of the country would continue to be stable in 2020 and later years as well, including in some states that obtain waivers that would not have otherwise done so.” However, there is far more uncertainty for some segments of the population:

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/06/26/the-cbo-confirms-senate-republicans-health-care-bill-is-a-turkey/

[Rene]

1. and it's not FIXING the actual problem

Insurance companies charging too much; drug costs; high costs in medical procedures/care.