Moderate Republicans Pulling Their Support Of Obamacare Replacement Bill

HORSLEY: Well, as you say, the forecast from the CBO says the GOP plan would insure a lot fewer people than Obamacare does – 14 million fewer next year, 24 million fewer by 2026.

Overall, the public is torn over health care legislation: Fifty-one percent think the Affordable Care Act should not be repealed, but 45% think it should. So just so you know, Maria, this is the plan we ran on all of previous year.

Due to the proposed changes in Medicaid, the report finds that another 10 million people would become uninsuredby 2026. Besides the 14 million losing Medicaid coverage, the plan would also pull federal subsidies from low-income customers who buy non-group plans on the private Obamacare markets.

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney dismissed CBO’s ability to analyze health care coverage and said the focus should not be on how many people are insured.

The CBO report, compiled along with staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, determined that the Republicans’ American Health Care Act also would save money for taxpayers.

President Trump has not yet responded directly on Twitter to the CBO’s report.

The bottom line on the House Republican health care plan: 24 million Americans would ultimately lose their health insurance, but the federal government would save $337 billion.

“We are not going to have one-size-fits-all”, Trump said at a White House meeting with people dissatisfied with the Affordable Care Act, thanking the participants for sharing their tales of woe about “the very, very failed and failing Obamacare law”.

Conservatives have voiced skepticism of several of the bill’s details, with some calling a refundable tax credit for helping people buy insurance is “a new entitlement”.

The majority of the losses in coverage, though, would be due to the ACHA’s rollback of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, which resulted in many uninsured Americans gaining coverage under the Obama program.

According to the CBO’s estimates, premiums would rise 15 to 20 percent in 2018 and 2019 due to fewer healthy people signing up after lawmakers repeal Obamacare penalties for declining to obtain insurance.

But leading Democrat Chuck Schumer said the projections show “just how empty the president’s promises, that everyone will be covered and costs will go down, have been”. They said it was going to be better, it was going to be cheaper, it was going to insure the same amount of people at a lower price, and it’s not.

The independent Kaiser Family Foundation said the bill will offer less help to Americans living in rural areas, the elderly and the poor. After about 2020, though, forecasters are predicting somewhat lower premiums as more stripped-down policies are introduced.

The CBO said in its report that the Republican plan would save $337bn in government spending between 2017 and 2026.