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DemocratSinceBirth

(99,704 posts)
Wed May 24, 2017, 06:13 PM May 2017

The CBO confirms: The Republican health-care bill is rotten legislation

When the Congressional Budget Office finally released its scoring of the American Health Care Act, it seemed anti-climactic, if not irrelevant. The Senate is not bothering to take up the AHCA at all. The CBO score, to the delight of Democrats, does remind us how counterproductive is the GOP House bill, which every member will have to defend in 2018.

The CBO states that the AHCA reduces the federal deficit by $119 billion over 10 years, some $32 billion less than the previous version. (Had it been a negative number the House would arguably have had to revote on it to make it reconciliation-ready.) As Democrats are all too eager to point out, the savings comes from taking benefits away from poor and middle-class individuals. (“The largest savings would come from reductions in outlays for Medicaid and from the replacement of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) subsidies for nongroup health insurance with new tax credits for nongroup health insurance,” the report says.) The beneficiaries here are the rich: “The largest increases in the deficit would come from repealing or modifying tax provisions in the ACA that are not directly related to health insurance coverage — such as repealing a surtax on net investment income, repealing annual fees imposed on health insurers, and reducing the income threshold for determining the tax deduction for medical expenses.” These taxes fall largely on the richest taxpayers.

That’s not the worst of it for Republicans. First, once again we see that the GOP plan will substantially increase the number of uninsured. The CBO states:

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