BREAKING: Mike Johnson just said he won’t call a vote this year to extend enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act — effectively guaranteeing they will expire at the end of this month.
Meanwhile, the main House GOP bill (which doesn’t include any tax credit extension) will move forward anyway…and the Congressional Budget Office has published their official ten year score of the budgetary & insurance coverage impact of the bill:
H.R. 6703 would establish new rules for association health plans, modify requirements for individual and group health coverage, require contracts between plan sponsors and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to meet certain standards, and appropriate funding for reductions in cost sharing. CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that enacting the bill would reduce the deficit by $35.6 billion over the 2026-2035 period. CBO estimates that enacting the bill would decrease the number of people with health insurance by an average of 100,000 over the 2027-2035 period and reduce gross benchmark premiums by 11 percent, on average, through 2035.
Those last two points (100K losing coverage & gross benchmark premiums dropping 11%) come with some major caveats, however; read on…
As I noted in my writeup on both bills last week:
- Association Health Plans have long been rife with fraud and abuse which have left employers and employees with hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid medical bills
The CBO projects that this provision of the main House GOP bill would shift around 500,000 people from fully regulated small group coverage into poorly regulated association plans. They also assume that perhaps 200,000 currently uninsured people would gain this type of “coverage” which I guess is supposed to be considered a good thing.
