The Congressional Budget Office released its evaluation of the Senate health bill and found that 22 million people would lose health care.
The Washington Post reports that not only will millions lose coverage, the coverage available would be prohibitively expensive:
But the report digs deeper into the kind of insurance that people, especially poor people, would be able to access — and finds that it would be so financially burdensome with high deductibles that many people would choose not to sign up.
The CBO says that the Medicaid per capita cap will have dramatic impact on the states and that over the next decade, a large gap would grow between Medicaid spending under current law and under this bill. And that gap would only grow wider because of the compounding effect of the differences in spending growth rates.
The New York Times summarized the CBO report with these key points:
subsidies to help people buy health insurance would be “substantially smaller than under current law.”
deductibles would, in many cases, be higher.
Starting in 2020, the budget office said, premiums and deductibles would be so onerous that “few low-income people would purchase any plan.”
premiums for older people would be much higher under the Senate bill than under current law.
As an example, it said, for a typical 64-year-old with an annual income of $26,500, the net premium in 2026 would average $6,500, compared with $1,700 under the Affordable Care Act. And the insurance would cover less of the consumer’s medical costs.
Likewise, the report said, for a 64-year-old with an annual income of $56,800, the premium in 2026 would average $20,500 a year, or three times the amount expected under the Affordable Care Act.
