The long-awaited Congressional Budget Office analysis of the American Health Care Act has arrived and it unsurprisingly underscores just how dishonest the Republican sales job of the bill has been.
We’ll have a more thorough analysis soon, but at a top-line level:
- Republicans promised millions of people would not lose their health insurance; CBO says 14 million will within a year, and 23 million will over ten years.
- Republicans promised not to gut the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions, and even boasted that AHCA would bolster those protections; CBO concludes that AHCA would destroy pre-existing conditions protections for about one-sixth of the population. “[P]eople who are less healthy (including those with preexisting or newly acquired medical conditions) would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all,” in those states.
- Republicans insisted Medicaid beneficiaries would not lose coverage under their plan. CBO estimates that AHCA will cause 14 million people to lose their Medicaid benefits, relative to current law, after ten years.
So steady yourself for a new round of baseless attacks on the anonymous bearers of bad news at CBO.