As centrist Republicans contemplated an Obamacare repeal-and-replace plan, the CBO warned that doing so would boost the number of uninsured by 22 million. That scared enough Republicans away to kill the bill. The intrepid Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner noticed that, buried in a footnote, was a stunning rebuke of those CBO forecasts. Turns out, the CBO’s forecasts off by a factor of six. The report says that the mandate repeal will result in only 1.5 million dropping out of the individual insurance market, and 1 million from employer plans, with Medicaid enrollment unaffected. These forecasting errors don’t even rise to the “good enough for government work” level. But they were good enough to get Obamacare on the books, and then keep it there.
A group of free-market health care reformers have developed a reform that would sharply reduce premiums for individuals, wouldn’t cause millions to lose coverage, and would save taxpayers money.
Called the “Health Care Choices Proposal,” it would continue to have the government subsidize individual insurance, but would do so through block grants to states, rather than payments to insurance companies under ObamaCare.
The plan would let consumers apply subsidies to any type of plan they wanted, not just overpriced ObamaCare plans. And to lower insurance costs, it would lift many of ObamaCare’s costliest and most disruptive mandates, while continuing to protect those with pre-existing conditions.
And to encourage people to stay insured, the plan would also offer premium discounts for those who continuously enrolled.