Republicans know that if and when the Congressional Budget Office gets done scoring their Obamacare repeal and "replacement" plan it will be bad. Lots and lots of people—maybe 15 million?—will lose insurance and the costs to the treasury will be huge. So they're trying to head off bad headlines by saying what the CBO says just doesn't really matter. Oh, and telling lies, too.
“If you go back to what CBO predicted would be covered on the exchanges today [under the ACA] they’re only off by only a two-to-one ratio,” Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) told reporters. CBO said “21 million projected would be covered, but only 10 million people are covered.” […]
Republicans are making clear that they don’t have a ton of confidence in the agency’s estimates but acknowledge CBO scores are still the standard for congressional debates.
“The CBO score was wildly inaccurate [on the ACA] and we knew it was going to be, but those are the rules we have to go by,” said Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.).
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said he has “never been one who worried too much about scores because there are constraints that the bean counters have to operate under that don’t necessarily comport with reality.”
That there would be alternative facts, since 21 million is the number for people who are covered under Obamacare. And, by the way, the CBO forecasts made in 2010 on how much Obamacare would cost were wrong because they were way too high: "Instead of $1.35 trillion in costs from 2016 through 2025, Affordable Care Act-related expenditures are expected to be $1.207 trillion, the CBO said. That is an 11 percent reduction."
We've already seen an estimate from the CBO about what could happen with the repeal bill the House used as the basis for the current Ryancare bill, and it was really bad. They estimated the number of uninsured would increase by 18 million in the first year after enactment and that premiums would increase by as much as 25 percent in the first year. The number of uninsured would increase to 32 million by 2026, and premiums would double by 2026.
There are a few sops toward replacement in this Ryancare proposal, so those numbers might not be quite as dire, but they're still going to be really bad. Standard and Poors say from 6-10 million will lose insurance, a number that would be higher, but they expect “bigger states like New York and California cover from their own pockets in the future.” Brookings Institute analysts peg the number losing insurance at 15 million. But, like Republicans have been saying today, "We've paid way too much attention to coverage."