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January 05, 2016 at 10:43 AM
A Republican effort to kill parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) now looks as if it has even more power than it had a month ago to cut the federal budget deficit.
Analysts at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) say H.R. 3672, the Restoring Americans’ Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act bill, could cut the deficit by a total of $516 billion, or about $52 billion per year, from 2016 through 2025.
That’s up 8.9 percent from a $474 billion deficit impact estimate the CBO analysts published in mid-December.
The Senate has already approved the current version of H.R. 3672. House leaders expect the House to vote on the measure tomorrow.
See also: House to vote on killing major PPACA provisions
The White House says President Obama will veto the bill if it comes to his desk. Bill supporters would need to win two-thirds majority votes in both the House and the Senate to overturn a veto.
The current version of H.R. 3762 would eliminate the PPACA individual mandate penalty; the PPACA employer mandate penalty; PPACA Medicaid expansion program funding; any PPACA health insurance exchange coverage subsidies to be provided in 2018 or later and the PPACA Cadillac plan tax.
The bill also would eliminate an increased federal matching rate for personal care attendant services that’s on track to be provided starting in 2018.
The bill would leave the current ban on major medical underwriters’ use of personal health status information other than age, location and tobacco use in place.
CBO analysts predicted in October that an earlier version of H.R. 3762, which focused on eliminating the individual and employer mandates, would eventually increase the number of U.S. residents without any public or private health insurance to about 43 million, from about 26 million if the PPACA provisions that would be repealed remained in place.
See also: CBO: PPACA bill may lead to 55% rise in uninsured count
In December, the analysts estimated an expanded version of the bill would do more to reduce the federal government’s budget deficit but increase the number of uninsured people by 22 million, rather than just 17 million.
