CBO: Supreme Court health care ruling will save $84 billion over next 11 years

Also says repealing Affordable Care Act would add $109 billion to federal deficit

By Lorie Hailey
Associate Editor

WASHINGTON (July 24, 2012) —The Congressional Budget Office said today that the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act will save the government more than $84 billion over the next 11 years.

The CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation revised its estimates of the budgetary affects of the law’s health insurance coverage provisions, saying the provisions will have a net costs of $1,168 billion over the 2012-2022 period — compared with $1,252 billion projected in March 2012 for that 11-year period. Those figures do not include the budgetary impact of other provisions of the ACA, which in the aggregate reduce budget deficits, the CBO said.

The Supreme Court ruling “essentially made the expansion of the Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) a state option rather than what appeared to be mandatory for states that wanted to continue receiving federal matching funds for any part of their Medicaid program,” the CBO said.

The CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation also provided an estimate for H.R. 6079, the Repeal of Obamacare Act, which was passed July 11 by the U.S. House of Representatives. In that estimate, which was requested by House Speaker John Boehner, the CBO said the costs of enacting the legislation would increase federal budget deficits by $109 billion.

“Assuming that H.R. 6079 is enacted near the beginning of fiscal year 2013, CBO and JCT estimate that, on balance, the direct spending and revenue effects of enacting that legislation would cause a net increase in federal budget deficits of $109 billion over the 2013–2022 period,” the CBO said. “Specifically, we estimate that H.R. 6079 would reduce direct spending by $890 billion and reduce revenues by $1 trillion between 2013 and 2022, thus adding $109 billion to federal budget deficits over that period.”

The CBO said neither of the analyses represents a comprehensive new estimate of the budgetary effects of the Affordable Care Act.