The score is in, and as expected, it’s ugly:
The Senate bill to repeal the [Patient Protection and] Affordable Care Act would increase the number of people without health insurance by 22 million by 2026, a figure that is only slightly lower than the 23 million more uninsured that the House version would create, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Monday.
Next year, 15 million more people would be uninsured compared with current law, the budget office said.
An earlier House version of Trumpcare was scored by the CBO as likely to result in 24 million Americans becoming uninsured. This Senate version is barely less awful.
A summary of the score has been published on the CBO’s website.
CBO and JCT estimate that, in 2018, 15 million more people would be uninsured under this legislation than under current law—primarily because the penalty for not having insurance would be eliminated. The increase in the number of uninsured people relative to the number projected under current law would reach 19 million in 2020 and 22 million in 2026. In later years, other changes in the legislation—lower spending on Medicaid and substantially smaller average subsidies for coverage in the nongroup market—would also lead to increases in the number of people without health insurance. By 2026, among people under age 65, enrollment in Medicaid would fall by about 16 percent and an estimated 49 million people would be uninsured, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year under current law.
Gutting Medicaid and ripping apart the provisions of the Patient Protection Act will harm tens of millions of people and result in at least thousands of deaths. That’s immoral and unethical. This is evil legislation, and it absolutely must be defeated.