Health Reform: How do you enact a massive new program, and then keep it from being repealed after it fails? It’s simple. Just pull the numbers out of thin air. That’s basically what happened with Obamacare.
When centrist Democrats were deciding whether to support Obamacare in 2010, the “nonpartisan” Congressional Budget Office told them not to worry. The law, it said, would cut the deficit. It would bring 24 million people into the new Obamacare exchanges. Subsidy costs would be modest. And the number of uninsured would fall by more than half. Those Dems signed on.
Seven years later, as centrist Republicans contemplated an Obamacare repeal-and-replace plan, the CBO warned that doing so would boost the number of uninsured by 22 million. That scared enough Republicans away to kill the bill.
