The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act is expected to reduce the cost of the law by $84 billion over 11 years, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office and the staff of the Joint Committee finds.
What’s more, the two bodies say that recent legislation passed by the House of Representatives to repeal the Affordable Care Act, H.R. 6079, would cause a net increase in federal budget deficits of $109 billion between 2013 and 2022.
According to the CBO and Joint Commission, the insurance coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act will have a net cost of $1,168 billion over the 2012 to 2022 period—compared with $1,252 billion projected in March 2012 for that 11-year period. The report said those figures do not include the budgetary impact of other provisions of the act, which in the aggregate reduce budget deficits.
The Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act could not mandate states expand their Medicaid programs in order to continue receiving federal matching funds for any part of their Medicaid program. The projected net savings to the federal government resulting from the Supreme Court’s decision arise because the reductions in spending from lower Medicaid enrollment are expected to more than offset the increase in costs from greater participation in the newly established exchanges.
As for the cost of repealing the legislation, the CBO and Joint Commission assumed that H.R. 6079 would be enacted around the start of the 2013 fiscal year. It expects that legislation would reduce direct spending by $890 billion over the 2013 to 2022 period, but reduce revenues by $1 trillion during the same period.
The CBO and Joint Commission noted that the findings did not offer comprehensive new estimates of the budgetary effects of the Affordable Care Act. Instead, they only updated earlier estimates taking into account the Supreme Court decision. The estimated budgetary effects of repealing the act are close to an estimate of the budgetary effects of the act with the signs reversed. Some provisions of the act, they note, cannot be retroactively adjusted. They also anticipate that some of the changes put into place by the Affordable Care Act in how public and private health insurance and healthcare programs are administered would continue under H.R. 6079.
July 27, 2012
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-supreme_court_ruling_on_healthcare_reform_will_lower_costs.html