Good News/Bad News: CBO on Baucus Bill

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The much-anticipated CBO score is here. I’ve just begun to read it. The good news/bad news seems to be that it reduces the deficit by $81 billion over 10 years, but leaves 25 million uninsured (one-third of them illegal immigrants). Will post more soon.

UPDATE: Jonathan Cohn gives us the comparisons to the House bill:

That’s significantly lower than the projections from the House bill, which would result in 97 percent of legal residents and 94 percent of people living here. In raw numbers, it’s the difference between 25 million people remaining uninsured (Senate Finance bill) and 17 million (House bills) ten years hence.

Of course, those numbers involve a lot of uncertainty. Their significance is that they correspond to a particular level of benefits and financial assistance, at least in the calculations of the CBO. And this is something we’ve known for a while: The Senate Finance bill isn’t as generous or as protective as it ought to be.

But the fact that the measure would actually save money means, or should mean, there’s a bit more money to throw at the program–ideally, by raising a little more money in taxes and/or offsetting savings. The difference between covering people at the level of the Senate Finance bill and covering nearly all legal residents* is maybe $150 billion over ten years. That’s not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things.

UPDATE2: Wonkroom compares latest version to the original Baucus bill.