Abbreviated pundit roundup: CBO confirms Senate GOP health care bill is a disaster
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Higher deductibles? Check. Millions more uninsured? Check. Unaffordable plans that offer skimpy coverage? Check. Skyrocketing out-of-pocket costs? Check. The Congressional Budget Office confirmed that the Senate’s version of the House’s “mean” bill (tAbbreviated pundit roundup: CBO confirms Senate GOP health care bill is a disaster
Higher deductibles? Check. Millions more uninsured? Check. Unaffordable plans that offer skimpy coverage? Check. Skyrocketing out-of-pocket costs? Check. The Congressional Budget Office confirmed that the Senate’s version of the House’s “mean” bill (to use Trump’s own description) is still a policy and political nightmare. We begin today’s roundup of the reaction to the CBO score with Michael Tomasky at Newsweek: The bill is a policy monstrosity. A health-care monstrosity. It will dramatically increase the number of uninsured, by 22 million over 10 years, as you’ve heard. But it will also increase premiums for most people, at least at first. [...] All the cable networks on Monday night led with the 22 million uninsured, because it’s the biggest number and because it’s the “out-year” projection, which is what these reports always emphasize. But politically, the far more important number is 15 million. The CBO projects that the Senate bill would create 15 million more uninsured in 2018. That’s next year. An election year. That is to say that 68 percent of those expected to lose their coverage are going to lose it in the bill’s first year. The Republicans are gonna throw 15 million Americans off the insurance rolls in an election year? That’s a lot of people. Divided by 435, it’s around 34,000 people per congressional district, but of course the distribution won’t be even, and there will be many districts—toss-up districts—where 60,000 or 80,000 people will stand to lose their coverage. And states where half a million will lose coverage. How’d you like to be a Republican incumbent House member or senator defending that next fall? John Cassidy at The New Yorker highlights the toll the bill will take on the working poor: Whatever Trump and the Republicans might say, these figures make it very clear that the working poor would be huge losers under the bill. One of the progressive innovations of the A.C.A.’s expansion of Medicaid was that it allowed working families who subsisted just above the poverty line to get access to health care. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about sixty per cent of the people who enrolled in the program were employed. Under the Senate bill (and the House bill), many of these workers, some of whom could be earning as little as fifteen thousand dollars a year, would no longer be eligible for Medicaid in a few years, and they would have to take their chances in the open market. For them and anybody else who buys individual insurance, the outlook would be grim. The C.B.O. analysis said that premiums in the private market would rise by about twenty per cent next year, on average, because of the elimination of the individual mandate. After that, price premiums would start to fall relative to the current law, but so would the quality of insurance plans. Plans would offer fewer health services, and deductibles would rise even further. All this would happen by design. Here’s Eugene Robinson’s take: Republicans have no great political options here, so maybe they should just do what is right: stop sabotaging Obamacare and start working with Democrats to make it better. Read more