CBO Lowers Obamacare's Price Tag By $104 Billion

[_Kevin Graham]

Of course, expect the Right Wingers to claim "cooking the books." They only care about what teh CBO says when it appears to support their agenda.

CBO Lowers Obamacare's Price Tag By $104 Billion Over 10 Years

In its latest projections for Obamacare, the Congressional Budget Office has lowered the law's costs over the next 10 years by more than $100 billion.

Most of the change can be linked to lower spending on tax subsidies for coverage purchased on HealthCare.gov and its state counterparts, which can in turn be linked to lower-than-expected premiums.

CBO projected that the federal government would spend $164 billion less than previously expected on Obamacare subsidies by 2024. It appears that a number of factors contributed to that change. Premiums, especially in the near term, are expected to be lower than previously projected: The office estimated premiums would rise on average by about $100 in 2015. They are still expected to rise over the next decade, but at a lower rate than previously thought.

It's a combination of rising medical costs, a healthier enrollment population in 2015 and the make-up of the Obamacare plans, which have narrower provider networks and lower provider payments than their counterparts in the large-group market, that contribute to the CBO's calculations on premiums. Other changes, such as a smaller under-65 population, also factored into the revisions.

The savings on subsidies are somewhat offset by other revisions by CBO, including fewer individual mandate penalty payments and an estimated increase in the number of active workers with employer-based coverage (about 1 million per year), which decreases expected federal revenues.

The net effect is that the law is projected to cost $104 billion less over 10 years than CBO's most recent estimate in February 2014.

[_bcspace]

Wow! Just look at KG crow over a $100 billion dollar decrease AFTER a $2 trillion increase. See here...

Obamacare: CBO Says Price Tops $2 Trillion And Millions Out Of Work

[_Kevin Graham]

Wow, bcspace. You actually read the refutations of some of your pet claims from your pseudo-news sources and you still repeat them as if none of it has already been refuted. I've seen stupid and I've seen delusional ... but stupid and delusional... that's something special.

You post a link to the laughable Townhall website which claims Obamacare will cost two trillion over ten years and it claims this number derives from the CBO. But the link on that article takes up to another pseudo-news site, the Examiner. The link provided by the examiner purporting to prove the CBO made the claim, is conveniently a broken link. Gee, what rigorous standards of research we're dealing with.

In fact, this old claim has been refuted by numerous fact checkers, including politifact: The health care law could cost up to $2 trillion, "double what we were promised."

Even though American Commitment didn’t respond to our queries, we easily found similar statements about the health care law costing up to $2 trillion.

Though the claim is repeated often, it’s not accurate...In fact, the CBO has said that overall the health care bill actually reduces government spending by about $124 billion over 10 years.

So that one goes down in flames. So what other fun things did your article say? Oh yeah, this old canard: Obamacare "would cost the US economy 800,000 jobs." This is a three year claim that has been refuted but still thrives in the small minds of those residing within the bubble:

The right-wing media's interpretation of the CBO report was misguided. In fact, the report found that workers will choose to supply less labor. As health care expert Paul Van De Water pointed out: "The CBO report ... finds that health reform's major effect on employment will be a small reduction in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply. For example, some people with pre-existing health conditions may choose to retire earlier if they can obtain health insurance coverage through the new health insurance exchanges and no longer have to wait until age 65 for Medicare. If people voluntarily choose to reduce their hours of work, however, that's not killing jobs." [Email to Media Matters, 10/28/10]

Well, strike two.

And here is my favorite lie from your article: "Bush's average deficit was in the neighborhood of $250 billion, even with two active wars)"

Anyone with basic math skills can figure out that Bush's deficits averaged $442 billion over eight years, and what's so pathetic about this comparison is that it ignores the fact that Bush inherited a surplus and squandered it. In fact, the deficit under Bush literally doubled in both his first and second year in office. The deficit went from -$128 billion to + $157 billion in 2002 and then in 2003 it more than doubled again to $377 billion and then in 2004 it went to $412 billion. The only reason the deficit appeared to be neutral to war spending was because Bush financed the wars "off the books." That is something Obama put and end to in his first year in office. This is from the Washington Post:

During the George with. Bush presidency those costs were financed through supplemental spending that was not part of the appropriations process. In short, the funding was kept off the books. But in a speech to a joint session of Congress in 2009, a newly inaugurated Obama announced the end to that deceptive budgetary practice.

So Bush pulled one over on us back then and you people living in the bubble remain fooled. You now laugh at the fact that the deficit under Obama is supposed to be "only" $550 billion, but your pseudo-news sites neglect to disclose the fact that the deficit he was handed by Bush in 2009 was a whopping $1.4 trillion and the deficits have been dramatically decreasing throughout Obama's presidency while they were dramatically increasing throughout with's. In short, the exact opposite of what your pseudo-news article just said, is true.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/dow ... 101mcn_G0f

And of course, none of your sites share the fact that the CBO reports they love to misrepresent so much, claims that the ACA will effectively REDUCE budget deficits. While it costs roughly $1.36 trillion over ten years, it is still less than what we would be spending on health care without the ACA. That's what you don't get.

Strike three. You're out.