Plan B Forum

Once Again, Obamacare Is Turning Out To Be Cheaper Than Expected
—By Kevin Drum| Mon Mar. 9, 2015 1:57 PM EDT

Here's some good news: the latest report from the CBO has reduced its estimate of the cost of Obamacare. This is due partly to a slight decrease in the number of people CBO expects to be covered, but mostly due a lower estimate of the cost of insurance premiums. Thanks to this, federal subsidies are estimated at $209 billion less over a ten-year period, and the cost of CHIP and Medicaid is estimated at $73 billion less. However, there are also reductions in expected revenues from Obamacare's excise tax, so the net reduction amounts to $142 billion over ten years. The table below tells the story.

Sarah Kliff has more details here. As she notes, this isn't the first time CBO has reduced its estimate of how much Obamacare will cost: "The CBO is projecting the federal government will spend $600 billion less on health care than the agency expected in 2010, when it wasn't counting even a dollar of the spending in Obamacare. That's simply an amazing fact." Yep.

Hidden Healthcare Horrors
March 27, 2015 5:14 pm March 27, 2015 5:14 pm


One of the odder subplots of the health reform saga has been the almost pathetic efforts of Republicans to come up with Obamacare horror stories. You might think that given the complexity of the law and the almost unlimited resources of the propaganda machine, they’d be able to come up with someone to serve as the poster child of the law’s terrible effects on innocent Americans. As far as I know, however, we have yet to see a single credible example — all the characters featured in Koch brothers ads or GOP speeches have turned out to be potential beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act, if only they were willing to look at their actual options.

So Cathy McMorris Rodgers went on Facebook to ask for Obamacare horror stories — and instead got an avalanche of testimonials from people who got essential insurance and care thanks to the ACA.

Why can’t the GOP find the horror stories it knows, just knows, must be out there? Matthew Yglesias gets at most of it by noting that Obamacare does, in fact, redistribute from the few to the many:

[O]ne of the main things it does is raise taxes rather dramatically on a pretty small number of high-income people in order to give subsidized health insurance policies to a substantially larger number of low-income people. Indeed, this is one of the main things Republicans don’t like about it!

But there’s a bit more to the story. Millionaires paying higher taxes aren’t the only people hurt, at least slightly, by the law. If you are a young. healthy person (especially if you’re male), living in a state that didn’t have community rating pre-ACA, you may have had a cheap policy that went up in price once the law went into effect; and if you’re affluent as well, you don’t receive subsidies. So there are victims out there.

The problem for the GOP is that they’re the wrong kind of victims. What Republicans want are struggling, salt of the earth regular Americans, preferably older and with expensive medical conditions — not healthy, well-paid guys in their 20s. But the profile of the ideal Obamacare victim matches, pretty much exactly, the profile of the kind of person Obamacare was designed to help.

And the inability of the GOP to come up with true horror stories is, in its own way, a demonstration that the law is working as intended.