Officials at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) are just saying no to the idea of coming up with another estimate of how much repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) would cost.
CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf broke the news to supporters of H.R. 45, a PPACA repeal bill that's set to come to the House floor Thursday, in a letter to Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the chairman of the House Budget Committee, and to several other House committee leaders.
Ryan had asked the CBO to provide an H.R. 45 cost estimate.
"Unfortunately, we will not be able to do so," Elmendorf wrote in the letter. "Preparing a new estimate of the budgetary impact of repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would take considerable time—probably several weeks—for CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), because there are hundreds of provisions in the ACA and those provisions are already in various stages of implementation."
In the past several years, the Republican majority in the House has voted to pass many full and partial PPACA repeal bills. In the Senate, Democrats have voted to kill all of the bills.
