CBO projects lower Affordable Care Act cost estimates
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that major health insurance coverage provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will cost taxpayers more than $1.2 billion from 2016 to 2025.
The updated estimate is $142 million or 11 percent less than the previous projection from January 2015.
In a report released on March 9, the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) said that the decrease in cost estimates was due to a projected reduction in health insurance premiums and a lower estimate of the number of people who will gain insurance through the ACA.
The agencies said 24 million to 25 million people would gain insurance because of ACA provisions.
The CBO and JCT found that health insurance spending per enrollee increased 1.8 percent per year from 2006 to 2013 compared with an average increase of 5.0 percent from 1998 to 2005.
From 2016 to 2025, the CBO and JCT project private health insurance spending will increase by an average of 5.6 percent per year. They also estimate private health insurance spending will increase by an average of 4.3 percent per year from 2014 to 2018 and 5.9 percent per year from 2019 to 2025.
Compared with its previous projections from January 2015, the agencies estimated there would be a smaller loss of employment-based coverage and fewer people buying insurance on health insurance exchanges or enrolling in Medicaid.
Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.