Democrats use CBO report to attack GOP health bill
WASHINGTON >> Democrats needled Republicans on Thursday with the gloomy assessment that 23 million people would lose insurance under the Republican health care bill, and that premiums for seriously ill people would rise. The leader of the Senate GOP effort to dismantle President Barack Obama’s health care law faulted Democrats for not working with them.
“The goal was to make sure we changed the laws in America so more Americans would have the protection of health insurance. Just the opposite occurs” under the GOP bill the House approved this month, said No. 2 Senate Democratic leader Richard Durbin of Illinois.
Durbin’s remarks came a day after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that the House bill would result in 23 million additional people going without insurance in 2026, including 14 million next year. It also said the legislation would make coverage more costly, even unaffordable, for many people with costly medical problems. Senate Republicans are holding closed-door meetings in an effort to write their own legislation.
In remarks on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., did not mention the budget office report. He said Obama’s law is “not going to just magically, magically somehow get better” and said Democrats were trying to “blame someone other than themselves for the failures of Obamacare” by not working with the GOP.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Democrats would work with Republicans “once they take repeal off the table,” a point he’s made before.
The House narrowly approved its measure with only Republican votes on May 4 after several embarrassing setbacks. Republican senators have said they’re moving in their own direction. They’ve discussed changing the House’s proposed Medicaid cuts and aiming health care tax credits more toward low earners, but they’ve reported little progress.
The report found that under the House measure, people in some regions with pre-existing medical conditions or the seriously ill “would ultimately be unable to purchase” robust coverage at premiums comparable to today’s prices, “if they could purchase at all.”
That was a knock on 11th-hour changes Republicans made in the bill to gain conservatives’ votes by letting states get waivers to boost premiums on the ill and reduce coverage requirements.
The budget office said older people with lower income would disproportionately lose coverage. Over half of those becoming uninsured, 14 million people, would come from the bill’s $834 billion in cuts over 10 years to Medicaid, which provides health coverage to poor and disabled people.
The analysis said the House bill would reduce federal deficits by $119 billion over the next decade. The previous version of the bill reduced shortfalls by $150 billion.