The Congressional Budget Office has now weighed in on the House Republicans’ proposed substitute to the House health reform legislation. The results aren’t pretty.
According to the CBO, the GOP plan does little to expand coverage: 52 million Americans would remain uninsured by 2019, up from 50 million in 2010. Nor does the plan do anything to end insurers’ practice of denying health coverage because of pre-existing conditions. And forget about subsidies to help working-class Americans afford health insurance.
Ezra Klein sums up the CBO’s findings nicely:
CBO begins with the baseline estimate that 17 percent of legal, non-elderly residents won’t have health-care insurance in 2010. In 2019, after 10 years of the Republican plan, CBO estimates that …17 percent of legal, non-elderly residents won’t have health-care insurance….
But maybe, you say, the Republican bill does a really good job cutting costs. According to CBO, the GOP’s alternative will shave $68 billion off the deficit in the next 10 years. The Democrats, CBO says, will slice $104 billion off the deficit.
The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan.
But the plan does lower premiums, which is no surprise since sick people who need heath coverage the most will be left out of the system. So Republicans have that going for them.
