Obamacare will reduce the number of uninsured by 19 million through 2015, Congress’ in-house budget office said Monday.
The Congressional Budget Office reported in an update to its budget estimates Monday that Obamacare reduced the number of uninsured non-elderly people by 12 million through 2014, the first year in which the law’s exchanges were open.
By 2015, according to the CBO, the number of uninsured will drop by 19 million total, to just 31 million. That figure represents one out of every nine U.S. residents under the age of 65.
By 2025, the last year for which the CBO produced estimates, between 24 million and 27 million more people will have health insurance coverage than would have without the law.
The CBO’s projections for spending through the law, meanwhile, continue to fall.
Altogether, federal spending on insurance coverage will total $76 billion in 2015 and $1.35 trillion over the nine years after that. That total is down $101 billion, or 7 percent, since the CBO’s last estimate in April.
Since the CBO first issued estimates for the law in 2010, its projections for spending have come down by roughly 20 percent, mostly because of slower increases in health care prices during that time.
In the latest estimates, spending on the health insurance exchanges is marked down by $71 billion over 10 years. Most of that represents smaller cost-sharing subsidies and lower tax credit subsidies for exchange enrollees, as projected by the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, which produces estimates of tax revenues for Congress.
Medicaid spending also is projected to fall, by $60 billion over 10 years. That decrease in projected spending is attributable to a slowdown in spending growth for long-term services and because spending has been lower than expected in recent months.
The lower projected spending on the Obamacare exchanges and Medicaid expansions will be offset by greater Medicaid spending on new enrollees, who get a higher matching rate from the federal government. Medicaid is jointly administered by the states and the federal government.
The CBO also projected that Medicaid spending would increase after funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program drops in 2016 and current beneficiaries of that program entered Medicaid. CBO is required to assume that Congress would not reinstate the CHIP funding.
