Re: Senate Healthcare Bill Released
It is interesting to note that the vast majority of people who would "lose" health insurance under the proposed House and/or Senate tweaks would do so by choice unlike those who lost the plans and doctors that they liked prior to the ACA.
I don't believe in the original bill anyway, so I'm not concerned about the "impact" of the proposed tweaks.I think it's reasonable to criticize the importance the CBO places on the individual mandate.
This critique seems like a bit of cherry picking to me. The 2010 CBO estimates made two primary mistakes:
1. Overestimated the number of people that would enroll in exchanges.
2. Underestimated the number of people that would enroll in Medicaid.
However, it's worth noting that:
1. While the CBO was wrong about exchange enrollment, they were still roughly correct about the overall increase in number insured.
2. Any criticism of Medicaid enrollment numbers is disingenuous since the ability for states to decline Medicaid expansion was due to a Supreme Court ruling that the CBO could not have predicted.
3. The CBO's estimates of Obamacare were still more accurate than a number of other contemporaneous estimates.
The implied criticism in this piece is that, if the CBO made some mistakes on their ACA projections, it must also be wrong about the current Senate bill. But the CBO was largely correct on the broad scope of insurance coverage changes, and independent reviews have not shown their estimates to be inaccurate. LINK and LINK. On a more practical note, if you eschew the CBO projections, what other method of predicting the effects of this legislation would you turn to?
It is interesting to note that the vast majority of people who would "lose" health insurance under the proposed House and/or Senate tweaks would do so by choice unlike those who lost the plans and doctors that they liked prior to the ACA.