Democrats and much of the media are screaming within the Congressional Budget Office's estimate that 24 million Americans will “lose” their own health insurance thanks to the GOP-proposed American Healthcare Act. Actually, the CBO numbers are guesses based on another reality.
Back when they wrote the ObamaCare law, Democrats gamed the machine to obtain happy predictions from CBO – numbers that never showed within this reality. Naturally enough, the push to exchange ObamaCare now yields some scary estimates.
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CBO said the Affordable Care Act would trim the deficit; reality's been the opposite. It said 24 million people would be enrolled in the exchanges right now. Reality: below 11 million.
And the agency continues to be projecting the exchanges to cover 19 million by 2021 if nothing changes. Actually, enrollment leveled off this last year; at best, it's on target to stay around 11 million. More likely, this program has started its “death spiral,” with soaring prices prompting plummeting enrollment.
Then, too, CBO says the repeal from the “individual mandate” – the acceptable for not having insurance – would drive 18 million people to drop their coverage by next year. But which includes 6 million of the 11 million on the exchanges – suggesting that more than 1 / 2 of those individuals only buy insurance to prevent the fine.
Much as we hate ObamaCare, we do not believe that – the fines aren't high enough. And even if CBO's right, then those people don't really want their policies, so they wouldn't be “losing coverage,” but fleeing it.
CBO also says 5 million would quit Medicaid – even though premiums are tiny. Anyway, everyone who qualifies can re-join Medicaid the instant they need it, so those folks wouldn't truly lose coverage.
Plenty of other CBO assumptions are simply as dubious. For example, the company guesses that the bill would push-up exchange premiums – when Health Secretary Tom Price has already started the process of pushing them down, by junking Obama-era regulations that forced every policy to pay for a long liberal wishlist, from “free” contraceptives to chiropractors and other alternative medicines.
The GOP bill isn't perfect, but it's an authentic first step toward moving beyond a method that's on track to implode. The scary headlines only describe a fantasy world where ObamaCare is really a smashing success.
