There is a reason the CBO will never give the Republican healthcare plan a good score and they will not explain it in their reports. The Democrats then use the scores to scare liberal Republicans.
Avik Roy, writing for Forbes, explains why Republicans will never get a good CBO score. There will always be more than 20 million who will lose their health insurance under the Republican healthcare bill, no matter what they do.
No amount of tweaking will change their numbers. The reason is primarily because the CBO relies on the individual mandate, which is the government mandate that Americans must purchase healthcare. The Republicans are eliminating the mandate. The people who won’t get healthcare are the ones who don’t want to buy it.
In addition to the mandate, the CBO’s outdated March 2016 baseline, combined with the mandate, accounts for nearly all the CBO-scored coverage difference between GOP bills and Obamacare.
It’s why throwing money at Medicaid or at the opioid epidemic or anything else Republicans do, won’t matter in the least. It will always be about 22 or 23 million without healthcare. Three-fourths or 16 million who “lose” healthcare are “losing” it by choice. They are giving it up.
The CBO isn’t honest in their reporting. They report the numbers who lose healthcare but won’t report the year-by-year loss because it shows that those without healthcare increases as the mandate is relieved. They simply do not report the impact of the mandate on the reduction of numbers on healthcare.
Many people haven’t bought Obamacare and take the fine because it’s not worth it. It’s very expensive and ends up amounting to catastrophic care because of the large deductibles and co-pays.
If people aren’t buying insurance because the government isn’t making them buy it, then no one is taking it away, as the Democrats like to say.
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Forbes reminds the readers that when Senator Barack Obama ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, he mocked Hillary’s insistence on an individual mandate. “If a mandate was the solution,” he said at the time, “you could try that to solve homelessness by mandating that everybody buy a house. But the reason they don’t have a house is they don’t have the money.”
How things changed.
President Trump addressed healthcare today and pushed Senate Republicans to keep their promise. Obamacare has “broken our healthcare system”, it has “collapsed”, he said.
