House Dems health bill: $1 trillion
Posted: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 6:43 PM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Congress, Democrats
From NBC's Mike Viqueira, Domenico Montanaro and Luke Russert
The Congressional Budget office estimates, preliminarily, that the House health care bill will cost $1.04 trillion -- before "offsets" are calculated.
The measure would leave 17 million uninsured in 2020, according to CBO. Half of that number would be illegal immigrants, and much of the remainder would be people who opt to forgo coverage and pay a fine. Without the plan, the CBO says 54 million would be without insurance in 2020.
The bill would leave 97% of Americans with insurance -- 30 million would be choosing the "public option."
Democrats are quick to point out that with the offsets, they expect the measure to be revenue neutral after 10 years. Offsets include a surtax on the wealthiest Americans and reforms in Medicare.
The bill will see committee action in the House this week. Leaders promise a vote before August recess in the House.
So-called Blue Dog Democrats wanted the bill to come in under $1 trillion, so this could reflect a compromise.
Video: Few distractions have been deemed worthy of the Obama Administration's attention as they put the hard sell on health care reform. NBC's Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd provides analysis.
But Republicans are already calling this calling an "incomplete number" and a backloaded bill that the CBO will have to update after they read the actual bill.
Don Stewart, an aide to Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell, writes that "the average cost of the second five years is about $171 billion annually. Or, put another way, 85 percent of the costs are in the second five years of the bill (2015-2019). So…they’ve backloaded the costs and the consequences until after the next presidential election. They’ve also lowered their per-year cost by not implementing the bill until four years into their budget window."
Michael Steel, an aide to House Minority Leader John Boehner, called the tactic "the ‘fierce urgency’ of chutzpah."
Steel also called the bill "scored" with an asterisk: "Actually, CBO didn’t score the bill. In the second paragraph of CBO’s letter, it says, 'It is important to note, however, that those estimates are based on specifications provided by the tri-committee group rather than an analysis of the language released today.' So they scored what Democrats asked them to score. Not the actual bill."
And he further points out: "House Democrats have used a gimmick to backload the true cost of their health bill. One consequence they may not have expected? According to CBO, under their bill the number of Americans without health insurance increases for the next three years."
