Last Call For The Losing Score

The Congressional Budget Office estimates for the American Health Care Plan Trumpcare are out and they're even worse than expected as Vox's health care reporter Sarah Kliff explains.

The Congressional Budget Office report on AHCA runs five pages, and you can read it here. Here are the key points it makes:

• CBO estimates 14 million would lose coverage in 2018, mostly people in the individual market. This report projects that much of the early coverage loss would stem from repealing Obamacare’s mandate that all Americans purchase coverage or pay a fine. “Some of those people would choose not to have insurance because they chose to be covered by insurance under current law only to avoid paying the penalties, and some people would forgo insurance in response to higher premiums,” the report concludes.
• After that, increases in the uninsured would be from Medicaid cuts. After 2018, CBO thinks that most of the increase in the number of uninsured would stem from changes the AHCA would make to Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, an expansion that allowed many more low-income adults to enroll in the program. The bill would “freeze” enrollment in that program on January 1, 2020. Medicaid enrollees would trickle off the rolls as their incomes changed. And this would lead to another big decline in coverage. The number of uninsured, CBO projects, would rise by 21 million in 2020 and hit 24 million in 2026.
• The individual market would remain small but stable. CBO projects that as the individual market shrinks, premiums would rise between 10 to 15 percent as some healthy people flee in 2018. But over the next few years, the agency expects premiums to go down to 10 percent lower than under Obamacare. CBO thinks more young people will come into the market, as the GOP plan makes a number of changes to make the market more appealing to younger, healthier enrollees.
• AHCA would be a huge cut to Medicaid. CBO estimates it would reduce spending on the health program for low-income Americans by $880 billion over the next decade. This helps explain why AHCA would reduce the deficit: The bill is spending a lot less money on entitlement programs.

In other words, the CBO estimates are actually worse that the Brookings Institute estimate from last week, if that tells you anything.

In fact you know it's bad, because Republicans like Paul Ryan are only talking about the long term 10% premium costs long term, and the deficit reduction.  Never mind it ruins health care for tens of millions of people, right?

This report confirms that the American Health Care Act will lower premiums and improve access to quality, affordable care. CBO also finds that this legislation will provide massive tax relief, dramatically reduce the deficit, and make the most fundamental entitlement reform in more than a generation. 

Yeah.

Read em and weep boys.