In the political hullabaloo over efforts to shift costs of health care to someone else, the argument for keeping Obamacare’s compulsory insurance and ever‐expanding Medicaid enrollment relies naïvely on notoriously comical Congressional Budget Office (CBO) 10‐year “projections.”
CBO claims the initial House Republican plan would eventually cause 3 million to “lose” health insurance simply because they would no longer be fined up to 2.5% of income for not buying a policy designed by and for politicians. This not a loss, but a gain – in freedom of choice.
CBO claims the GOP plan would “lose” another 14 million by not expanding Medicaid enrollment as rapidly as Obamacare hopes to. The federal government pays about 57% of the cost of Medicaid for poor people, but 90–93% (until 2022) to the 31 states that provide Medicaid to those earning up to 138% of the poverty line. That has added 17 million to the Medicaid rolls, and enriched big health insurers and Kaiser Permanente.