CBO: the repugican Obamacare bill would increase deficit and uninsured rate

by Joan McCarter

The "Save American Workers Act," repugicans attempt to make it easier for employers to exploit their workers, gets a vote in the House this week. The bill is another attack on Obamacare, a "fix" that would change the definition of full-time work in the bill from 30 hours per week to 40. The employer mandate in the law says that employers with 50 or more workers has to either provide insurance to 95 percent of their full-time employees or pay a fine. The repugicans like to pretend that this means bosses will cut their workers' hours, and they'll fix that when in reality their bill will allow employers to get 39.5 hour work weeks out of their employees without having to shell out for benefits. It wouldn't just hurt workers, though. The Congressional Budget Office says it would create a $53 billion hit to the deficit and increase the uninsured rate.

The agency thinks that 1 million fewer people would get health insurance at work: an employer might decide not to offer coverage to someone who works 35 hours per week, for example, because they no longer face a penalty. Some of these people would just be out of luck — a bit fewer than 500,000 people, CBO says, would end up uninsured. More would end up on government programs: between 500,000 and 1 million people would join Medicaid or enroll through the exchanges (maybe with a federal subsidy, if they earn less than 400 percent of the poverty line) after losing their employer coverage.
As a result, CBO estimates that the federal government would end up spending $53.2 billion more on the Affordable Care Act.

Remember when the deficit was the only thing that (supposedly) mattered to repugicans?

McConnell says CBO estimate that 40 hour bill adds to deficit doesn't bother him. "It will be on the floor." #ACA
— @jrovner

The White House issued a veto threat (let the year of the veto commence), saying the bill "would shift costs to taxpayers, put workers' hours at risk, and disrupt health insurance coverage." For repugicans, that's a feature rather than a bug.