When I joked about the truth dying, I wasn’t entirely unserious. As I discussed yesterday, and as Steve Benen discusses today, the Affordable Care Act has been scored by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) several times, and it always comes back with a report saying that the bill will reduce the budget deficit. Their latest report (pdf), released yesterday, says that ObamaCare will now cost $84 billion less over the next decade than anticipated thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Medicaid expansion, which will cost about 3 million people access to health care. The CBO released a second report yesterday that scored a recently-passed House bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. They said that bill would cost the government $109 billion over the next decade. Please understand that repealing ObamaCare would not only cost $109 billion; it would also eliminate the cost savings of the bill which can now be calculated as $294 billion between now and 2023.
The net effect of repealing ObamaCare would be to lose $294 billion in savings and to add $109 in costs, resulting in the loss of $403 billion to the treasury. Keep in mind that the direct costs of the Iraq War were about $700 billion. We are talking about a lot of money here. The Republicans’ bill repealing ObamaCare would, if passed by the Senate and signed by the president, not only cost us in excess of $400 billion, it would deny health care coverage to 30 million Americans. And the GOP has no plan, none, to provide any relief to those 30 million Americans.
Now, go crank up your Google Machine and see how many times the Republicans, including their presidential candidate, have said that ObamaCare is too expensive, is a budget buster, is unfair to our children who will have to pay for it, etc. It’s a mantra with these folks.
The CBO is not just non-partisan. The Republicans currently control the House of Representatives. There is no way for the Democrats to use the CBO as some partisan tool to create the numbers they want.
Now, I understand that it is hard to comprehend how you can give 30 million people health care coverage and wind up saving money. To understand it, you can read the CBO’s report. Here’s the bottom line numbers:
On net, CBO and JCT estimate, repealing the ACA would increase federal budget deficits by $109 billion over the 2013–2022 period. Repealing the coverage provisions discussed in this report would save $1,171 billion over that period, but repealing the rest of the act would increase direct spending and reduce revenues by a total of $1,280 billion.
For the record, the JCT is the Joint Committee on Taxation, which is made up 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats. They co-authored the CBO report, meaning that Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah, agree with these numbers. Of course, they’d never admit that out loud on television or radio or to a print journalist.
That’s because, for the GOP, the truth died. Everything they say about health care is a lie.
