CBO: By 2026, Only 4 Million People Will Remain Insured By the Republican Health Care Bill

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


While I was out to lunch, I was feeling bummed that I wouldn’t immediately see the CBO score of the Republican health care bill. As Hyman Roth said, “This is the business we’ve chosen.” Still, that’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?

But I’ve seen it now (click here), and the headline news is CBO’s projection of how many more people will become uninsured compared to Obamacare: 14 million in 2018, 21 million in 2020, and 24 million in 2026. But here’s the thing. The last time I saw a CBO estimate, it projected that Obamacare would reduce the ranks of the uninsured by 27 million people in 2025, and today’s report projects 28 million in 2026. So here’s what the Republican plan looks like:

You read that right: CBO projects a decline of 24 million from a baseline of 28 million. Of the 28 million people currently insured because of Obamacare, only 4 million will be left by 2026.

With a couple of corrections because I mistakenly used an old CBO report, this matches almost perfectly my estimate from last week of the impact of RepubliCare. Not bad! Unfortunately, the price of my being right is that 24 million people will be uninsured yet again if Republicans manage to pass their monstrosity of a bill. Here are CBO’s other three main findings:

  • The Republican bill would reduce the deficit by $337 billion over ten years, mainly by kicking lots of people off Medicaid
  • Premiums would go up until 2020, and then decrease. By 2026 they’d be about 10 percent lower than now.
  • The individual market would remain stable.

I’m a little surprised by the last bullet. According to the report, “key factors bringing about market stability include subsidies to purchase insurance, which would maintain sufficient demand for insurance by people with low health care expenditures, and grants to states from the Patient and State Stability Fund which would reduce the costs to insurers of people with high health care expenditures.”

Unless I’m missing something, CBO is projecting “sufficient demand” at the same time they’re saying that demand will crater. As for the stability fund, that comes to $10 billion per year, maybe half of which is actually for high-risk patients. That’s practically a rounding error in the health care market. Something doesn’t smell right here.

That said, the big news is the projection of 24 million people losing health coverage by 2026. I wondered last week if CBO would have the guts to make a projection like this, and it turns out they did. Republicans may try to keep up the pretense that their bill would continue to insure practically everyone, but the truth is just the opposite: almost no one would be covered. And that’s a feature, not a bug.

UPDATE: I’ve changed the headline and the text from 3 million to 4 million. The CBO report I linked above projected that Obamacare would be responsible for a net increase of 27 million insured people by 2025, so I initially used that number for 2026 as well. That left 3 million still insured after a decline of 24 million. But today’s CBO score says the 2026 number is 28 million under Obamacare. So 4 million would be left under the Republican bill.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate