CBO’s Failed Obamacare Enrollment Projections

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has consistently failed to accurately predict how legislation will impact health insurance coverage. For example, in 2012, the CBO estimated that 25 million people would have coverage under Obamacare right now. According to a June 2017 report from HHS, only 10.3 million were actually enrolled. CBO’s guess was off by nearly 15 million people. And as the chart shows, CBO has consistently gotten it wrong.

The CBO’s history of inaccuracy is reason enough not to blindly trust its analysis of the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA). In fact, CBO’s past inaccuracies contribute to its misleading analysis of insurance coverage under the BCRA. The starting point CBO uses to score the BCRA says that 15 million people should be enrolled through Obamacare’s exchanges right now – wrong again.

The CBO was wrong when it first analyzed Obamacare in 2010. And it was wrong when it updated its projections in 2012 and 2014. Even today, the CBO is using a starting point from 2016 to predict the impact of repealing and replacing Obamacare that has already been proven, well, wrong.
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