Fact Check: No, the Republican Healthcare Bill Would Not Cause 23 Million People to "Lose" Insurance

Guy Benson / Townhall Columnist

 

As Katie reported last evening, the latest Congressional Budget Office score of the House-passed American Health Care Act contains good news and bad news for the GOP. On the bright side, it appears that its central fiscal outcome complies with reconciliation rules, which would allow the process to move forward without a complicated tweak-and-do-over vote in the House. The nonpartisan scorekeeper also found that individual market premiums "would decline on average," and would reduce the federal deficit by $119 billion. On the other hand, media outlets are running with false headlines like these:

This is deeply misleading, for reasons that we explained in detail when the CBO released its March analysis of the initial ACHA. In short, the large bulk of those who are said to be "losing" coverage do not currently have coverage. You cannot "lose" something that you don't have.  CBO assumes that these people would eventually gain coverage through the magical powers of Obamacare's individual mandate (more on that in a moment), or through hypothetical future expansions of Medicaid by most of the states that haven't done so to date. Current Medicaid beneficiaries, including those who've gained (very flawed) coverage under Obamacare's expansion, are grandfathered in under the House GOP proposal.  It also bakes into these new numbers a slew of empirically-incorrect projections that have been disproven by actual data. When Obamacare first passed, CBO anticipated that by 2016, 21 million Americans would enroll in the law's exchanges.

Read entire article here: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2017/05/25/no-the-republican-healthcare-bill-would-not-cause-23-million-people-to-lose-insurance-n2331434