The CBO says « few low-income people would purchase any plan » under GOP health bill.
The Congressional Budget Office has released its of the Senate GOP’s Better Care Reconciliation Act, and it’s a bloodbath. The bill is expected to lead to 15 million fewer people with health insurance by 2018 — and 22 million fewer by 2026. But the most devastating of the CBO’s conclusions can be found on page eight. There, the Congressional Budget Office says the BCRA would make decent insurance so expensive that “few low-income people would purchase any plan” at all. Here’s the section: A bit of background is helpful. A “silver plan” is an insurance plan that covers 70 percent of a person’s expected health care costs. Obamacare’s subsidies were designed to make silver plans affordable and to limit out-of-pocket costs. The BCRA cuts Obamacare’s subsidies and designs its own subsidies around plans that cover 58 percent of expected health care costs. Those plans, the CBO estimates, will come with deductibles of around $6,000 — which means they would bankrupt many poor people before they ever got through the deductible. On page 27 of the report, CBO offers an illustrative example. Imagine, they say, a person who makes 75 percent of the poverty line and is currently on Medicaid. The deductible would be They would be paying for health insurance that they would destroy them financially if they tried to use it. So here is what the CBO is saying: The BCRA’s subsidies are too small to make the silver plans affordable for low-income people, and the plans it is trying to make affordable — the ones that cover 58 percent of expected costs — carry such high deductibles that low-income Americans won’ t buy them because they won’ t be able to afford to use them. This, then, is what the BRCA actually does: It makes health insurance unaffordable for poor people in order to finance. But there’s much more in the CBO report worth noting. A few points:
