It’s long been an annoying truth for Republicans trying to make their case against Obamacare: Congress’ official scorekeeper has consistently said the law will lower the federal deficit rather than raise it.
But by delaying three of the law’s taxes in a major, bipartisan spending agreement forged early Wednesday morning, the GOP has brought the law closer to the deficit-increasing side of the fence.
“The Affordable Care Act would no longer reduce deficits this decade if all three of these taxes are subsequently repealed,” said Loren Adler, research director for the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which has compiled estimates on how much the deal would reduce revenue coming into the government.
Until now, the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the Affordable Care Act has allowed Democrats to charge that Republicans are making the federal government’s debt worse as they have voted repeatedly to repeal President Obama’s signature health reform effort.
“Repealing the Affordable Care Act will increase deficits while bringing suffering to millions of families,” House Budget Committee ranking member Chris Van Hollen chided Republicans earlier this year. “It is long past time for Republicans to put an end to their obsessive crusade against the Affordable Care Act and start acting like responsible legislators.”
The law partially relies on excising more money from insurers and medical device manufacturers to pay for the law’s spending on insurance subsidies for low and mid-income Americans and Medicaid expansion.
But in the spending bill Congress is expected to pass before the Christmas holiday, lawmakers are delaying the law’s so-called “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans and 2.3 percent medical device tax by two years and pausing another health insurance tax for one year.
Those delays mean about $36 billion less to pay for the healthcare law, according to estimates from the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget. The Cadillac tax was projected to bring in $20 billion total in 2018 and 2019, while the health insurance taxes and medical device taxes would have raised about $12 billion and $4 billion in the years they were paused.
That’s still less than the law’s total savings, which the Congressional Budget Office most recently pegged at $137 billion.
But the fact that both parties in Congress agreed to delay the taxes could indicate an increased willingness to eventually do away with them entirely. And were that to happen, it would leave Obamacare with $257 less in revenue, transforming it from a deficit-reducer to a deficit-expander.
