CBO’s Net Result for Obamacare in 2018: Premiums Up 15%, Subsidized Users Down 2 Million

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The last time CBO published its “baseline” projection for the health insurance market was September 2017. Today they have a new one. Can you feel the excitement in the air?

Let’s go straight to Obamacare since I know that’s really all that anyone cares about. Here are the changes in CBO’s projections now that the great Republican repeal/sabotage effort has played out:

Premiums in 2018 are 15 percent higher than they originally projected last year.
The number of people receiving subsidies for Obamacare is down by 2 million (-19 percent).
The number of unsubsidized Obamacare users is up by 1 million. (17 percent)
The number of people eligible for Medicaid is down slightly (by less than half a million, or around -2 percent).

The rest of CBO’s numbers don’t make sense to me because they don’t seem to add up. For what it’s worth, though, they also project that the number of uninsured will decline by about a million. They also project that last year’s changes will decrease the deficit by $50 billion, but that has little to do with Obamacare. It’s mostly to do with changes to employer health care payouts and reductions in Medicaid payments.