Democrats are using a new report released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to paint newly emboldened Republicans as being hypocritical when it comes to reducing the nation’s deficit.
Republican leaders have insisted that their first order of business in the new Congress will be to find ways to cut spending. In their quest to slash the federal debt, valued at around $14 trillion, the GOP has identified President Obama’s landmark healthcare reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as a mammoth waste of taxpayer dollars.
Republicans, who now control the House, are preparing to introduce a bill — H.R. 2 — aimed at rolling back the entire package of reforms.
Yet, the new CBO report estimates that repealing the law would add nearly a quarter trillion dollars to the annual deficit, currently upwards of $1.3 trillion. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, called the GOP legislation a “dramatic power-grab.”
“The GOP’s budget busting repeal bill will kill jobs, raise costs and deny critical care to Americans who need it,” Miller said.
Among its findings, the report suggests that the repeal legislation would add $230 billion to the deficit between now and 2021, and would leave 32 million Americans, who would have access to health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, without it. Moreover, the report estimates that that H.R. 2 would add over one trillion to the deficit in the decade following 2021.
However, the report notes that all estimates are based upon assumptions that every single provision of the healthcare law will be implemented according to plan over the next ten years.
“The projections of the bill’s budgetary impact are quite uncertain,” CBO Chief Douglas Elmendorf wrote in a letter to new House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “As a result, CBO believes that its estimates of the net budgetary effects of health care legislation have a roughly equal chance of turning out to be too high or too low.”
In an analysis of the GOP’s bill, the conservative Heritage Foundation disagreed with Democratic concerns that repealing the healthcare law would add to the deficit. The organization wrote on Thursday that Medicare payments to doctors, a cost which was not included in the Affordable Care Act, as well as legal challenges to the individual mandate grossly embellish the law’s projected savings.
“[Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)] claimed that repealing Obamacare would do “very serious violence to the national debt and deficit.” Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Conn Carroll, a spokesman for the organization.